



n 










' >,*'' 


'a 


'' ' 8 


1 \ ''■' 


N^^\ 


c^ 




\ 




y 




1^" 









'*. c,^ 









^ . u ■* 



^t._ v*^ 



vO 


^^. 










/- - 


---^ 






^/^ *« 


1 1 




, 


(7> 




(^ 


^ 


V, 'e<^ 




\^ 


kA) 


^ ° '^-P 


'^^ 


v^E 


m/// 


A z 




s 


w 


.' / 


A. 






% -• V 




( A 


. s^ 


^.^ 






%>.V//^1^ 



0^ 



•C 7 V " \ 












A MANUAL 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



OF THE HISTORY OF 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 



91^ i;0tmati €0np^st 



WITH NUMEROUS SPECIMENS. 



GEOEGE LfCRAIK, LL.D., 

PROFKSSOR OF HISTORY AND OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE IN QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST. 




LONDON: 
GRIFFIN, BOHN, AND COMPANY, 

STATIONERS' HALL COURT. 
1862. 



PI 




U-«»OK : PRINTED RT W. CLOWES ANO .SONS, STAMFORD STREET, 



ADYERTISEMENT. 



The present volume consists of so nmcli of a larger work 
recentl}'- published on the same subject as seemed sufficient to 
make a convenient and comprehensive text-book for schools and 
colleges, and to supply all the information needed by studentKS 
in preparing themselves for the Civil Service and other com- 
petitive examinations. The concluding section is nearly all 
that has been added. 

The reader will do well to keep in mind, or under his eye, 
the four following Schemes, or Synoptical Yiews, according to 
which the history of the English Language in its entire extent 
may be methodized : — 



1. Original, Pure, Simple, or First English (commonly called 

Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon) ; Sjmthetic, or Inflectional, in its- 
Grammar, and Homogeneous in its Vocabulary ; 

2. Broken, or Second English (commonly called Semi-Saxon). 

— from soon after the middle of the eleventh centurj^to about 
the middle of the thirteenth — when its ancient Grammatical 
System had been destroyed, and it had been converted from 
an Inflectional into a Non-Inflectional and Analytic lan- 
guage, by the first action upon it of the Norman Conquest; 

3. Mixed, or Compound, or Composite, or Third English, — since 

the middle of the thirteenth century — about which date its 
Vocabulary also began to be changed by the combination of 
its original Gothic with a French (Eomance or Neo-Latin) 
element, under the second action upon it of the Norman 
Conquest 



( vi ) 



II. 



1. The Original form, in whiclitlie three vowel-endings a, e, and 

u are employed in the declension of norms and the conju- 
gation of verbs ; 

2. The Second form, in which the single termination e repre- 

sents indiscriminately the three ancient vowel-endings, but 
still constitutes a distinct syllable ; 

3. The Third form, in which this termination e of nouns and 

verbs, though still written, is no longer syllabically pro- 
nounced. 



III. 

1 . Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon ; throughout the period before the Nor- 

man Conquest; 

2. Semi-Saxon; from about the middle of the eleventh to the 

middle of the thirteenth century; the period of the Infancy 
and Childhood of our existing national speech ; 

3. Old, or rather Early, English ; from the middle of the thirteenth 

to the middle of the fourteenth century ; the period of the 
Boyhood of our existing speech ; 

4. Middle English ; from the middle of the fourteenth to the 

middle of the sixteenth century ; the Youth, or Adolescence 
of our existing speech ; 

5. Modern English ; since the middle of the sixteenth centnry ; 

the Manhood of our existing speech » 



IV. 

A.D. 

450. Commencement of the conquest and occupation of South 
Britain by the Angles and Saxons, bringing with them 
their ancestral Gothic speech ; 



1066. Conquest of England by the Normans; Establishment of 
French as the courtly and literary language of the coun- 
try; Commencement of the reduction of the ancient ver- 
nacular tongue to the condition of a patois, and of its 
conversion from a synthetic to an analytic tongue ; 



1 1 54. End of the reign of the four Norman kings and" accession 
of the Plantagenet dynasty ; Beginning of the connexion 
with Southern France through the marriage of Henry II. 
with Eleanor of Poitou ; Termination of the National 
Chronicle, the latest considerable composition in the 
regular form of the ancient language ; Full commencement 
of the intermixture of the two races ; 



1272. New age of the Edwards; Commencement of the con- 
nexion of the English royal family with that of France 
by the second marriage of Edward I. with a daughter of 
Philip III. ; Employment, at first occasionally, afterwards 
habitually, of French instead of English as the language 
of the Statutes ; Commencement of its active intermixture 
with the vernacular tongue ; 



( viii ) 

1362. Trials at law in tlie King's Courts directed by the statute 
of 36 Edward III. to be conducted no longer in French 
but in English ; Victory of the native tongue in its new 
composite form over its foreign rival, and recovery of its 
old position as the literary language of the countiy, under 
the impulse of the war with France, and of the genius of 
Minot, Langland, and Chaucer ; 

1455. Outbreak of the desolating War of the Eoses, and complete 
extinction for a time of the light of literature in England ; 

1558. Accession of Elizabeth; Commencement of a new literarj^ 
era, with the native language in sole dominion ; 

1660. Restoration of the Stuarts ; Noonday of the Gallican age 
of English literature ; 

1760. Accession of George III.; Complete association in the 
national literature of Scottish and Irish writers with those 
of England. 



CONTENTS, 



Book; 



INTRODUCTORY 

The Languages of Modern Europe 

Early Latin Literature in Britain 

The Celtic Languages and Literatures 

Decay of the Earliest Enghsh Scholarship 

The English Language 

Origirial English (commonly called Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon) 

The Norman Conquest ..... 

Arabic and other New Learning 

Schools and Universities 

Rise of the Scholastic Philosophy , ' , 
Classical Learning ; Mathematics ; Medicine ; Law ; 
The Latin Language ...... 

Latin Chroniclers 

The French Language in England 

The Langue D'Oc and the Langue D'Oyl . 

Vernacular Language and Literature : — a.d. 1066 — 1216 

The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries : — Ascendancy 

Scholastic Philosophy 
Mathematical and other Studies 
Universities and Colleges .... 
Cultivation and Employment of the Learned 

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries 
Last Age of the French Language in England 
Re-emergence of the English as a Literary Ton 
Second English (commonly called Semi-Saxon^ 
The Brut of Layamon 

The Ormulum 

The Ancren Pdwle .... 
Early English Metrical Romances 
Metrical Chronicle of Piobert of Gloucester 
Robert Mannyng, or De Brunne 
Lawrence Minot .... 

Alhterative Verse : — Piers Ploughman 
Piers Ploughman's Creed . 



Tongues in the 



gue 



f the 



PAGE 
1 

3 

7 
12 
16 
20 
24 
29 
34 
39 
41 
46 
47 
48 
53 
56 

67 
69 
73 



82 

85 

89 

95 

99 

102 

104 

105 

106 

110 

118 



X CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

THIRD ENGLISH {Mixed or Compound English) . , .121 

Geoffrey Chaucer 121 

John Gower 155 

John Barbour 157 

Compound EngHsh Prose : — Sir John Mandevil ; Trevisa ; 

Wiclif; Chaucer 164 

Printing in England : — Caxton 167 

Enghsh Chroniclers 169 

Bishop Pecock ; Fortescue ; Malory 169 

English Poets : — Occleve ; Lydgate 174 

Scottish Poets ; — Wynton ; James I. ; Henryson ; Holland ; 

Blind Harry 176 

Prose Writers : — More ; Elyot ; Tyndal ; Cranmer ; Latimer . 183 

Scottish Prose Writers 190 

English Poets : — Hawes ; Barklay 191 

Skelton 192 

Roy ; John Heywood 194 

Scottish Poets : — Gawin Douglas ; Dunbar ; Lyndsay . . 195 

Surrey ; Wyatt . . . . . . . . . ' . 196 

The Elizabethan Literature 198 

The Mirror for Magistrates 198 

Origin of the Regular Drama 200 

Interludes of John Heywood 202 

Udall's Ralph Roister Doister • . .203 

Gammer Gurton's Needle 205 

Misogonus 206 

Chronicle Histories : — Bale's Kynge Johan, etc. . . . 207 

Tragedy of Gorboduc : — Blank Verse 208 

Other Early Dramas 211 

Second Stage of the Regular Drama : — Peele ; Greene . . 212 

Marlow 214 

Lyly; Kyd ; Lodge 215 

Earlier Elizabethan Prose : — Lyly ; Sidney ; Spenser ; Nash ; etc. 219 

Edmund Spenser 224 

Other EUzabethan Poetry 237 

William Warner 238 

Samuel Daniel 242 

Michael Drayton 246 

Joseph Hall 249 

Joshua Sylvester 249 

Chapman's Homer 251 

Harington ; Fairfax ; Fanshawe 252 

William Drummond 553 

Sir John Davies ......... 253 

John Donne 254 

Shakespeare's Minor Poems 257 

Shakespeare's Dramatic Works 258 



CONTENTS. ■ xi 
THIRD ENGLISH— co?2-^wMed 

PAGE 

Dramatists contemporary v/ith S]iakes]3eare . , . . 265 

Beaumont and Fletcher 266 

Jonson . 270 

Massinger; Ford . 271 

Later Elizabethan Prose Writers ...... 272 

Translation of the Bible . 273 

Theological Writers : — Bishop Andrews ; Donne ; Hall ; Hooker 274 

Francis Bacon 275 

Eobert Burton 277 

Historical Writers ......... 278 



MIDDLE AND LATTEE PART OP THE SEVENTEENTH 

CENTURY 280 

Shirley, and end of the Old Drama 280 

Giles Fletcher ; Phineas Fletcher ...... 282 

Other Religious Poets : — Quarles ; Herhert ; Herrick ; Crashaw . 283 

Cartwright ; Randolph ; Corbet . . . . . . . 284 

Poets of the French School : — Carew ; Lovelace ; Suckling . . 286 

Denham 288 

Cleveland 289 

Wither 290 

William Browne 296 

Prose Writers :— Charles 1 297 

Milton's Prose Works 299 

Hales; Chillingworth ......... 301 

Jeremy Taylor .......... 302 

Fuller 303 

Sir Thomas Browne . . ' 306 

Sir James Harrington ......... 308 

Newspapers . 309 

Retrospect of tlie Commonwealth Literature . . . ,310 

Poetry of Milton 312 

Cowley 321 

Butler 323 

Waller 323 

Marvel 325 

Other Minor Poets . . . 327 

Dryden . . . . . . . . . . .328 

Dramatists . 331 

Prose Writers :— Clarendon 333 

Hobbes .334 

Henry Nevile 336 

Other Prose Writers :— Cudworth ; More ; Barrow ; Bunyan ; &c. 337 



CONTENTS. 



TAGE 

THE CENTURY BETWEEN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 

AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION .... 341 

First Effects of the Revolution on our Literature .... 341 

Surviving Writers of tlie preceding Period ..... 342 

Bishop Burnet .......... 345 

Thomas Burnet .......... 346 

Other Theological Writers :— Tillotson ; South . . . .346 

Locke 348 

Swift . 349 

Pope 353 

Addison and Steele 357 

Shaftesbury ; Mandeville . . . . . . . .359 

Gay; Arbuthnot; Atterbury ....... 362 

Prior; Parnell 363 

Bolingbroke 364 

Garth ; Blackmore ......... 365 

Defoe 366 

Dramatic Writers 369 

Minor Poets 370 

Collins ; Shenstone ; Gray . . . . . . . ,376 

Young; Thomson 377 

Armstrong ; Akenside ; Wilkie ; Glover . . . . .379 

Scottish Poetry 380 

The Novelists Richardson ; Fielding ; Smollett .... 382 

Sterne 387 

Goldsmith 388 

Churchill 392 

Falconer ; Beattie ; Mason 393 

The Wartons ; Percy ; Chatterton ; Macpherson . . . . 394 

Dramatic Writers 396 

Female Writers 397 

Periodical Essayists . 398 

Political Writing : — Wilkes ; Junius 401 

Johnson ........... 404 

Burke 408 

Metaphysical and Ethical Writers 421 

Historical Writers : — Hume ; Robertson ; Gibbon . . , 422 

Political Economy ; Theology ; Criticism and Belles Lettres . . 426 



THE LATTER PART OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . 427 

Cowper 427 

Darwin ........... 437 

Burns 440 



CONTENTS. • xiii 

PAGE 

THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY 457 

Last Age of the Georges. — Wordsworth ..... 459 

Coleridge 474 

Southey 481 

Scott 482 

Crabhe ; Campbell ; Moore . 488 

Byron 496 

Shelley 497 

Keats 501 

Hunt 505 

Other Poetical Writers of the earlier part of the Nineteenth Century 510 

Prose Literature ......... 511 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY ..... 513 

Mrs. Browning 514 

Tennyson ........... 522 

Brownins; . . . . . ' 526 

Hood . ^ 531 

Index 533 



SPECIMENS. 



PAGE 

Song of Canute 87 

Archbishop Aldred's Curse 87 

St. Godric's Hymn . . . .87 

„ Sister's Khyme 88 

,, Hymn to St. Nicholas 88 

Rhyme of Flemings and Normans (1173) 88 

Hugh Bigott's Boast 88 

The Here Prophecy . . .88 

Layamon's Brut : — Part of Introduction 92 

The Ormulum : — Part of Dedication 96 

„ „ Injunction as to Spelling 98 

The Ancren Riwle : — Eating and Fasting 101 

Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle : — French Language in England . 105 

Minot; First Invasion of France by Edward HI. . . . . 108 

Vision of Piers Ploughman : — Commencement .... 113 

Piers Ploughman's Creed : — Description of Piers . . . .118 

Chaucer : — House of Fame ; Eagle's Address to Chaucer . '" . . 138 

„ „ „ Notice of Fire-arms .... 140 

„ „ „ Old Mechanical Artillery . . . 141 

„ Canterbury Tales ; The Prioress (from the Prologue) . 142 

„ „ „ The Mendicant Friar (from the Prologue) 143 

„ „ „ Emily (from the Knight's Tale) . . 145 

„ „ „ Temple of Mars (from the Knight's Tale) 146 

,, „ ,, Passages relating to the Host . . 148 

,, „ „ Part of the Clerk's Tale of Griselda . 153 

Barbour : — The Bruce ; Eulogy on Freedom 162 

Mandevil : — Travels ; part of Prologue ...... 164 

Chaucer (Prose) : — Canterbury Tales ; Pride in Dress, etc. . . 166 
Bishop Pecock : — Repressor ; Midsummer Eve 
Fortescue : — Difference, etc. ; French King and People 
Malory : — Morte Arthur ; Death of Lancelot . 



Wyntoun : — Chronicle 

Bhnd Harry : — Wallace ; his Latin Original 



The same subject 
Commencement of the Poem 



170 
171 
173 
177 

181 
181 
181 



SPECIMENS. 



XV 



Blind Harry : — Wallace ; Part of Battle of Shortwoodsliaw 

L'Envoy 

Sir Thomas More : — Letter to his Wife 

ITdall : — Ralph Roister Doister . 

Spenser : — Fairy Queen ; Belphoehe 

Warner : — Albion's England ; Old Man and his Ass 

„ „ ,^ Fall of Richard the Third . 

,, „ ,, Fair Rosamund and Queen Eleanor . 

Daniel : — Musophilus ; Defence of Poetry 

Drayton : — Polyolhion ; Stag-hunt 

„ ISTymphidia ; Queen of the Fairies 

Sylvester ; — Divine Weeks and Works ; Praise of Night . 

Donne : — Song 

Cleveland : — Epitaph on Ben Jonson 

„ Eulogy on Jonson 

Wither : — Amygdala Britannica ; Prophecy 

„ Songs and Hymns ; Thanksgiving for Seasonable Weather 

„ „ ,, Thanksgiving for Victory 

Fuller : — Worthies ; Shakespeare and Ben Jonson .... 

„ „ Philemon Holland 

ISIilton : — College Exercise ; His iSTative Language .... 

Waller : — His Last Verses 

Marvel :— The Picture of T. C 

IMandeville : — Fable of the Bees ; Anticipation of Adam Smith 
Burke : — Speech on Kabob of Arcot ; Devastation of the Carnatic 
„ Reflections on French Revolution ; Hereditary Principle 

„ Letter to Mr. Elliot ; True Reform . . . . 

„ Letters on a Regicide Peace ; Right Way of making V^ar . 

Cowper : — Table Talk ; National Vice 
„ Truth; Voltaire 

„ Conversation ; Meeting on the Road 

„ Lines on his Mother's Picture 

Darwin : — Botanic Garden ; " Flowei-s of the Sk 

„ „ „ The Compass 

Burns : — To a Mouse .... 
„ To a Mountain Daisy 

„ Epistle to a Young Friend 

, The Vision (part) 

„ Highland Mary 

„ Verses from various Songs 

Wordsworth : — The Fountain, a Conversation 
„ The Affliction of Margaret 

„ " Her Eyes are wild" 

„ Laodamia 

Coleridge : — " Maid of my Love " . 
„ Time, Real and Imaginary 

„ Work without Hope . 

,, Youth and Age . 

„ " Yes, yes ! that boon !" 



to Emmaus 



PAGE 

182 
183 
185 
204 
234 
241 
241 
242 
244 
246 
248 
250 
256 
290 
290 
293 
295 
296 
304 
304 
313 
324 
326 
360 
414 
415 
417 
419 
432 
432 
433 
434 
439 
439 
442 
444 
446 
449 
453 
453 
463 
465 
467 
469 
475 
476 
477 
477 
479 



SPECIMENS. 



Coleridge : — Love, Hope, and Patience, in Education 
Scott : — Marmion ; The Battle (part) 

Campbell ; — Adelgitha 

„ Theodric ; Letter of Constance 

Crabbe : — Tales of the Hall ; Story of tbe Elder Brother 
Moore : — Lalla Kookh ; Calm after Storm 
Shelley : — Ode to a Skylark ..... 
Keats : — Ode to a Nightingale 
Hunt :— The Sultan Mahmoud .... 

„ The Fancy Concert 

Mrs. Browning : — A Child's Grave at Florence 

„ Aurora Leigh ; Pictures of England 

„ Paris . 

„ „ „ Her Mother's Picture 

Tennyson : — The Lord of Burleigh .... 

„ Wellington. .... 

K. Browning : — The Pied Piper of Hamelin (part) . 

Hood :— The Death-bed 



(part) 



480 
484 
491 
491 
492 
495 
499 
503 
505 
507 
514 
518 
519 
520 
522 
524 
526 
531 



MANUAL OF THE HISTOKY 

OF 

ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



The Languages of Modern Europe. ' 

The existing European languages may be nearly all compre- 
hended under five divisions. First, there are tlie Celtic tongues 
of Ireland and Wales, and their subordinate varieties. Secondly, 
there are the tongues founded upon the Latin spoken by the 
old Eomans, and thence called the Eomance or the Neo-Latin, 
that is, the Xew Latin, tongues; of these, the principal are 
the Italian, the Spanish, and the French, The Eomaic, or 
Modern Greek, may be included under the same head. Thirdly, 
there are what have been variously designated the Germanic, 
Teutonic, or Gothic tongues, being those which vv^ere originally 
spoken by the various barbarian races by whom the Eoman 
empire of the West was overthrown and overwhelmed (or at the 
least subjugated, revolutionized, and broken up) in the fifth and 
sixth centuries. Fourthl}^, there are the Slavonic tongues, of 
which the Eussian and the Polish are the most distinguished. 
Fifthly, there are the Tschudic tongues, as they have been deno- 
minated, or those spoken by the Finnic and Laponnic races. 
Almost the only language which this enumeration leaves out is 
that still preserved by the French and Spanish Biscayans, and 
known as the Basque, or among those who speak it as the 
Euskarian, which seems to stand alone among the tongues not 
only of Europe but of the world. It is supposed to be a remnant 
of the ancient Iberian or original language of Spain. 

The order in which four at least of the five sets or classes of 
languages have been named may be regarded as that of their 
probable introduction into Europe from Asia or the East, or at 
any rate of their establishment in the localities of which they 
are now severally in possession. First, apparently, came the 
Celtic, now driven on to the farthest west ; after whicli followed 

B 



2 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

in succession the Latin, tlie Grothic, and the Slavonic, pressing 
upon and urging forward one another like so many waves. 

Their present geographical position may also be set forth 
in few words. Those of the Celtic type are found, as just 
mentioned, in the West, the Latin generally in the South, the 
Slavonic in the East, the Tschudic in the North, and the Gothic 
over the whole of the central region. The chief exception is, 
that one Tschudic language, the Madgyar, is spoken in Hungary, 
at the south-eastern extremity of Europe. 

The English is essentially or fundamentally a Gothic tongue. 
That is to say, it is to be classed among those which were spoken 
by the main division of the barbaric invaders and conquerors of 
the Roman empire, and which are now spread over the whole of 
the central portion of the European continent, or what we may 
call the body of Europe as distinguished from its head and 
limbs. These Gothic tongues have been subdivided into the 
High-Germanic, the Low-Germanic, and the Scandinavian ; and 
each of these subordinate groups or clusters has a certain 
character of its own in addition to the common character by 
which they are all allied and discriminated from those belonging 
to quite other stocks. They may be said to present different 
shades of the same colour. And even in their geographical dis- 
tribution they lie as it were in so many successive ridges ; — the 
High-Germanic languages farthest south ; next to them, the Low- 
Germanic, in the middle ; and then, farthest north, the Scandi- 
navian. The High-Germanic may be considered to be principally 
represented by the modern classic German ; the Low-Germanic 
by the language of the people of Holland, or what we call the 
Low Dutch, or simply the Dutch; the Scandinavian, by the 
Swedish, Danish, or Icelandic. 

It may be remarked, too, that the gradation of character 
among the three sets of languages corresponds to their geo- 
graphical position. That is to say, their resemblance is in pro- 
portion to their proximity. Thus, the High-Germanic and the 
Scandinavian groups are both nearer in character, as well as in 
position, to the Low-Germanic than they are to each other ; and 
the Low-Germanic tongues, lying in the middle, form as it were 
a sort of link, or bridge, between the other two extreme groups. 
Climate, and the relative elevation of the three regions, ma}*- 
have something to do with this. The rough and full-mouthed 
pronunciation of the High-Germanic tongues, with their broad 
vowels and guttural combinations, may be the natural product 
of the bracing mountain air of the south ; the clearer and neater 
articulation of the Low-Germanic ones, that of the milder 



EARLY LATIN LITERATURE. 



influences of the plain ; the thinner and sharper sounds of the 
Scandinavian group, that of the more chill and pinching hyper- 
borean atmosphere in which they have grown up and been 
formed. 



Early Latin Literature in Britain. 

When the South of Britain became a part of the Eoman empire, 
the inhabitants, at least of the towns, seem to have adopted gene- 
rally the Latin language and applied themselves to the study of 
the Latin literature. The diffusion among them of this new taste 
was one of the first means employed by their politic conquerors, 
as soon as they had fairly established themselves in the island, 
to rivet their dominion. A more efficacious they could not have 
devised ; and, happily, it was also the best fitted to turn their 
subjugation into a blessing to the conquered people. Agricola, 
having spent the first 3'ear of his administration in establishing 
in the province the order and tranquillity which is the first 
necessity of the social condition, and the indispensable basis of 
all civilization, did not allow another winter to pass without 
beginning the work of thus training up the national mind to a 
Eoman character. Tacitus informs us that he took measures for 
having the sons of the chiefs educated in the liberal arts, excit- 
ing them at the same time by professing to prefer the natural 
genius of the Britons to the studied acquirements of the Gauls ; 
the effect of which was, that those who lately had disdained to 
use the Roman tongue now became ambitious of excelling in 
eloquence. In later times, schools were no doubt established 
and maintained in all the principal towns of Eoman Britain, as 
they were throughout the empire in general. There are still 
extant many imperial edicts relating to these public seminaries, 
in which privileges are conferred upon the teachers, and regula- 
tions laid down as to the manner in which they were to be 
appointed, the salaries they were to receive, and the branches of 
learning they were to teach. But no account of the British 
schools in particular has been preserved. It would appear, how- 
ever, that, for some time at least, the older schools of Gaul were 
resorted to by the Britons who pursued the study of the law : 
Juvenal, who lived in the end of the first and the beginning of 
the second centuiy, speaks, in one of his Satires, of eloquent 
Gaul instructing the pleaders of Britain. But even already 
forensic acquirements must have become very general in the 
latter country and the surrounding regions, if we may place any 
reliance on the assertion which he makes in the next line, that 



4 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

in Tlmle itself people now talked of hiring rhetoricians to manage 
their causes. Thule, whatever may have been the particular 
island or country to which that name was given, was the most 
northern land known to the ancients. 

It is somewhat remarkable that, while a good many names of 
natives of Gaul are recorded in connexion with the last age of 
Eoman literature, scarcely a British name of that period of any 
literary reputation has been preserved, if we except a few which 
figure in the history of the Christian Church, The poet Ausonius, 
who flourished in the fourth century, makes frequent mention of 
a contemporary British writer whom he calls Sylvius Bonus, and 
whose native name is supposed to have been Coil the Good ; but 
of his works, or even of their titles or subjects, we know nothing. 
Ausonius, who seems to have entertained strong prejudices 
against the Britons, speaks of Sylvius with the same animosity 
as of the rest of his countrymen. Of ecclesiastical writers in Latin 
belonging to the sixth century, the heresiarch Pelagius and his 
disciple Celestius, St. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, with his 
friend Bishop Secundinus, and the poet Sedulius, are generally 
regarded as having been natives of the British islands. 

Gildas, our earliest historian of whom anything remains, also 
wrote in Latin. St. Gildas the ^Vise, as he is styled, was a son 
of Caw, Prince of Stratholyde, in the capital of which kingdom, 
the town of Alcluyd, now Dunbarton, he is supposed to have 
been born about the end of the fifth or beginning of the sixth 
century. Caw was also father of the famous bard Aneurin : 
one theory, indeed, is that Aneurin and Gildas were the same 
person. In his youth Gildas is said to have gone over to 
Ireland, and to have studied in the schools of the old national 
learning that still flourished there ; and, like his brother 
Aneurin (if Aneurin was his brother), he also commenced his 
career as a bard, or composer of poetry in his native tongue. 
He was eventually, however, converted to Chiistianity, and 
became a zealous preacher of his new religion. The greater 
part of his life appears to have been spent in his native island ; 
but at last he retired to Armorica, or Little Britain, on the Con- 
tinent, and died there. He is said to lie buried in the Cathedral 
of Vannes. Gildas is the author of two declamatory effusions, 
the one commonly known as his History (De Excidio Britan- 
nise Liber Querulus), the other as his Epistle (De Excidio 
Britanniae et Britonum Exulatione), which have been often 
printed. The latest edition is that contained in the Monumenta 
Historica Britannica, 1848 ; and there is also an edition prepared 
by Mr. Joseph Stevenson for the English Historical Society, 



EARLY LATIN LITERATURE. 5 

8vo. London : 1834. A translation of the Epistle was published 
in 1638; and both works are included in Dr. Giles's Six Old 
English Chronicles, 1848. They consist principally of violent 
invectives directed against his own countrymen as well as their 
continental invaders and conquerors ; and throw but little light 
upon the obscure period to which they relate. 

Our next historical writer is Nennius, said to have been a 
monk of Bangor, and to have escaped from the massacre of his 
brethren in 613. He too, like Gildas, is held to have been of 
Welsh or Cumbrian origin : his native name is conjectured to 
have been ^^inian. But there is much obscurity and confusion 
in the accounts we have of K'ennius : it appear^ to be probable 
that there were at least two early historical writers of that name. 
The author of a late ingenious work supposes that the true 
narrative of the ancient Nennius only came down to the invasion 
of Julius Caesar, and is now lost, although we probably have an 
abridgment of it in thQ British History (Eulogium Britannise, 
sive Historia Britonum), published by Gale in his Scrip tores 
Quindecim, Oxon. 1691, which, however, is expressly stated in 
the preface by the author himself to have been drawn up in 858. 
A very valuable edition of ' The Historia Britonum, commonly 
attributed to Kennius, from a MS. lately discovered in the 
Library of the Vatican Palace at Eome,' was published in 8vo. 
at London, in 1819, by the Rev. W. Gunn, B.D., rector of Irstead, 
Norfolk ; and his greatly improved text has been chiefly followed 
in the subsequent edition prepared by Mr. Stevenson for the 
Historical Society (8vo. London, 1838). The most complete text, 
however, is probably that given in the Monumenta Historica 
Britannica, from a collation of no fewer than twenty-six manu- 
scripts. An English version, originally published by Mr. Gunn 
in his edition of the Vatican text, is reprinted by Dr. Giles in his 
Six Old English Chronicles. But the most curious and impor- 
tant volume connected with Nennius is that published in 1847 
by the Irish Archgeological Society, containing an Irish version 
of his History executed in the fourteenth century, with a transla- 
tion and Notes by Dr. Todd, together with a large mass of Addi- 
tional Notes, and an Introduction, by the Hon. Algernon Herbert. 

Ot' the Latin writers among the Angles and Saxons any of 
whose works remain, the most ancient is Aldhelm, abbot of 
Malmesbury, and afterwards the first bishop of Sherborn, who 
died in709. Aldhelm was of the stock of the kings of Wessex, 
and was initiated in Greek and Latin learning at the school in 
Kent presided over by the Abbot Adrian, who, like his friend 
Archbishop Theodore, appears to have been a native of Asia 



6 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE, 

Minor, so that Greek was his native tongue. We are assured by 
one of his biographers that Aldhelm could write and speak 
Greek like a native of Greece. He also early associated him- 
self with the monastic brotherhood of Malmesbury, or Meildulfes- 
byrig, that is, burgh or town of Meildulf, Maildulf, or Meldun, 
an Irish exile, by whom the monastery had been founded about 
half a century before the birth of Aldhelm. Among the studies 
of Aldhelm's after-life are mentioned the Eoman law, the rules 
of Latin prosody, arithmetic, astronomy, and astrology. 

But the English name of the times before the Norman Con- 
quest that is most distinguished in literature is that of Beda, or 
Bede, upon whom the epithet of " The Venerable " has been 
justly bestowed by the respect and gratitude of posterity. All 
that we have written by Bede is in the Latin language. He was 
bom some time between the years 672 and 677, at Jarrow, a 
village near the mouth of the Tyne, in the county of Durham, 
and was educated in the neighbouring monastery of Wearmouth 
under its successive abbots Benedict and Ceolfrid. He resided 
here, as he tells us himself, from the age of seven to that of 
twelve, during which time he applied himself with all diligence, 
he says, to the meditation of the Scriptures, the obseiwance of 
regular discipline, and the daily practice of singing in the church. 
" It was always sweet to me," he adds, " to learn, to teach, and 
to write." In his nineteenth year he took deacon's orders, and 
in his thirtieth he was ordained priest. From this date till his 
death, in 735, he remained in his monastery, giving up his 
whole time to study and writing. His principal task was the 
composition of his celebrated Ecclesiastical History of England, 
which he brought to a close in his fifty-ninth year. It is our 
chief original authority for the earlier portion even of the civil 
history of the English nation. But Bede also wrote many other 
works, among which he has himself enumerated, in the brief 
account he gives of his life at the end of his Ecclesiastical 
History, Commentaries on most of the books of the Old and 
New Testaments and the Apocrypha, two books of Homilies, 
a Martyrology, a chronological treatise entitled On the Six 
Ages, a book on orthography, a book on the metrical art, and 
various other theological and biographical treatises. He like- 
wise composed a book of hymns and another of epigrams. Most 
of these writings have been preserved, and have been repeatedly 
printed. It appears, from an interesting account of Bede's last 
hours by his pupil St. Cuthbert, that he was engaged at the 
time of his death in translating St. John's Gospel into his 
native tongue. Among his last utterances to his affectionate 



THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. 7 

disciples watcliing around liis bed were some recitations in 
the English language : "For," says the account, " he was very 
learned in our songs ; and, putting his thoughts into English 
verse, he spoke it with compunction." 

Another celebrated English churchman of this age was St. 
Boniface, originally named Winfrith, who was born in Devon- 
shire about the year 680. Boniface is acknowledged as the 
Apostle of Geiinany, in which country he founded various 
monasteries, and was greatly instrumental in the diifusion both 
of Chiistianity and of civilization. He eventually became arch- 
bishop of Mentz, and was killed in East Eriesland by a band of 
heathens in 755. Many of his letters to the popes, to the Eng- 
lish bishops, to the kings of France, and to the kings of the 
various states of his native country, still remain, and are printed 
in the collections entitled Bibliothec^ Patrum. 



The Celtic Lan^gtjages and Literatuees. 

Xo other branch of what is called the Indo-European family of 
languages is of higher interest in certain points of view than the 
Celtic. The various known forms of the Celtic are now regarded 
as coming under two great divisions, the Gaelic and the Cjmiric ; 
Ireland being the head seat of the Gaelic (which may therefore 
also be called Irish), Wales being the head seat of the Cymric 
(which accordingly is by the English commonly called Welsh). 
Subordinate varieties of the Irish are the Gaelic of Scotland 
(often called Erse, or Ersh, that is,. Irish), and the Manks, or 
isle of Man tongnie (now fast dying out) : other Cymric dialects 
are the Cornish (now extinct as a spoken language), and the 
Armorican, or that still spoken in some parts of Bretagne. 

The probability is, that the various races inhabiting the 
British islands when they first became known to the civilized 
world were mostly, if not all, of Celtic speech. Even in the 
parts of the country that were occupied by the Caledonians, the 
Picts, and the Belgian colonists, the oldest topographical names, 
the surest evidence that we have in all cases, and in this case 
almost our only evidence, are all, so far as can be ascertained, 
Celtic, either of the Cymric or of the Gaelic form. And then there 
are the great standing facts of the existence to this day of a large 
Cymric population in South Britain, and of a still larger Gaelic- 
speaking population in North Britain and in Ireland. No other 
account of these Celtic populations, or at least of the Welsh, 
has been attempted to be given, than that, as their own traditions 
and records are unanimous in asserting, they are the remnants 



8 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

of the races by wliicli tlie two islands were occupied when they 
first attracted the attention of the Eomans about half a century 
before the commencement of the Christian era. 

And both the Welsh and the Irish possess a large mass of 
literature in their native tongues, much of which has been 
printed, in great part no doubt of compai-atively modern pro- 
duction, but claiming some of it, in its substance if not exactly 
in the very form in which it now presents itself, an antiquity 
transcending any other native literature of which the country 
can boast. 

Neither the Welsh nor the Irish language and literature, how- 
ever, can with any propriety be included in a history of English 
literature and of the English language. The relationship of 
English to any Celtic tongue is more remote than its relation- 
ship not onlj^ to German or Icelandic or French or Italian or 
Latin, but even to Eussian or Polish, or to Persian or Sanscrit. 
Irish and Welsh are opposed in their entire genius and structure 
to English. It has indeed been sometimes asserted that the 
Welsh is one of the fountains of the English. One school of 
last-century philologists maintained that full a third of our 
existing English was Welsh. No doubt, in the course of the 
fourteen centuries that the two languages have been spoken 
alongside of each other in the same countiy, a considerable 
number of vocables can hardly fail to have been borrowed by 
each from the other ; the same thing would have happened if it 
had been a dialect of Chinese that had maintained itself all that 
time among the Welsh mountains. If, too, as is probable, a 
portion of the previous Celtic population chose or were suffered 
to remain even upon that part of the soil which (;ame to be 
generally occupied after the departure of the Eomans by the 
Angles, Saxons, and other Teutonic or Gothic tribes, the im- 
porters of the English langTiage and founders of the English 
nation, something of Celtic may in that way have intermingled 
and grown up with the new national speech. But the English 
language cannot therefore be regarded as of Celtic parentage. 
The Celtic words, or words of Celtic extraction, that are found 
in it, be they some hundreds in number, or be they one or two 
thousands, are still only something foreign. They are products 
of another seed that have shot up here and there with the proper 
crop from the imperfectly cleared soil ; or they are fragments of 
another mass which have chanced to come in contact with the 
body of the language, pressed upon by its weight, or blown upon 
it by the wind, and so have adhered to it or become imbedded in 
it. It would perhaps be going farther than known facts wan-ant 



THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. 9 

US if we were to say tliat a Gothic tongue and a Celtic tongue are 
incapable of a true amalgamation. But undoubtedly it would 
require no common pressure to overcome so strong an opposition 
of nature and genius. The Gothic tongues, and the Latin or 
Eomance tongues also, indeed, belong to distinct branches of what 
is called the Indo-European family; but the Celtic branch, 
though admitted to be of the same tree, has much more of a 
character of its own than any of the others. Probably any other 
two languages of the entire multitude held to be of this general 
stock would unite more readily than two of which only one was 
Celtic. It would be nearly the same case with that of the inter- 
mixture of an Indo-European with a Semitic language. It has 
been suggested that the Celtic branch must in all probability 
have diverged from the common stem at a much earlier date 
than any of the others. At any rate, in point of fact the 
English can at most be said to have been powdered or sprinkled 
with a little Celtic. Whatever may be the number of words 
which it has adopted^ whether from the ancient Britons or from 
their descendants the Welsh, they are only single scattered 
words. No considerable department of the English dictionary 
is Welsh. No stream of words has flowed into the language 
from that source. The two languages have in no sense met and 
become one. They have not mingled as two rivers do when 
they join and fall into the same channel. There has been no 
chemical combination between the Gothic and the Celtic ele- 
ments, but only more or less of a mechanical intermixture. 

As the forms of the original English alphabetical characters 
are the same with those of the Irish, it is probable that it was 
from Ireland the English derived their first knowledge of 
letters. There was certainly, however, very little literature in 
the country before the arrival of Augustine, in the end of the 
sixth century. Augustine is supposed to have established 
schools at Canterbury ; and, about a quarter of a century after- 
wards, Sigebert, king of the East Angles, who had spent part of 
his early life in France, is stated by Bede to have, upon his 
coming to the throne, founded an institution for the instruction 
of the youth of his dominions similar to those he had seen abroad. 
The schools planted by Augustine at Canterbury were afterwards 
greatly extended and improved by his successor, Archbishop 
Theodore, who obtained the see in 668. Theodore and his 
learned friend Adrian, Bede informs us, delivered instructions to 
crowds of pupils, not only in divinity, but also in astronomy, 
medicine, arithmetic, and the Greek and Latin languages. 
Bede states that some of the scholars of these accomplished 



10 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

foreigners were alive in his time, to whom the Greek and Latin 
were as familiar as their mother-tongue. Schools now began to 
multiply in other parts, and were generally to be found in all 
the monasteries and at the bishops' seats. Of these episcopal 
and monastic schools, that founded by Bishop Benedict in his 
abbey at Wearmouth, where Bede was educated, and that which 
Archbishop Egbert established at York, were among the most 
famous. But others of great reputation at a somewhat later date 
were superintended by learned teachers from Ireland. One was 
that of Maildulf at Malmesbury. At Glastonbury, also, it is 
related in one of the ancient lives of St. Dunstan, some Irish 
ecclesiastics had settled, the books belonging to whom Dunstan 
is recorded to have diligently studied. The northern parts of the 
kingdom, moreover, were indebted for the first light of learning 
as well as of religion to the missionaries from lona, which was 
an Irish foundation. 

For some ages Ireland was the chief seat of learning in 
Christian Europe; and the most distinguished scholars who 
appeared in other countries were mostly either Irish by birth 
or had received their education in Irish schools. We are 
informed by Bede that in his day, the earlier part of the eighth 
century, it was customary for his English fellow-countrymen of 
all ranks, from the highest to the lowest, to retire for study 
and devotion to Ireland, where, he adds, they were all hospitably 
received, and supplied gratuitously with food, with books, and 
with instruction.* The glory of this age of Irish scholarship and 
genius is the celebrated Joannes Scotus, or Erigena, . as he is as 
frequently designated, — either appellative equally proclaiming 
his true birthplace. He is supposed to have first made his appear- 
ance in France about the year 845, and to have remained in that 
country till his death, which appears to have taken place before 
875. Erigena is the author of a translation from the Greek of 
certain mystical works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, 
which he executed at the command of his patron, the French 
king, Charles the Bald, and also of several original treatises on 
metaphysics and theology. His productions may be taken as 
furnishing clear and conclusive evidence that the Greek language 
was taught at this time in the Irish schools. Mr. Turner has 
given a short account of his principal work, his Dialogue De 
Divisione Naturse (On the Division of Nature), which he cha- 
racterises as " distinguished for its Aristotelian acuteness and 
extensive information." In one place " he takes occasion," it is 
observed, "to give concise and able definitions of the seven 
* Hist. Eccles. iii, 28. 



THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. ' 11 

liberal arte, and to express his opinion on the composition of 
things. In another part he inserts a very elaborate discussion 
on arithmetic, which he says he had learnt from his infancy. 
He also details a curious conversation on the elements of things, 
on the motions of the heavenly bodies, and other topics of 
astronomy and physiology. Among these he even gives the 
means of calculating the diameters of the lunar and solar circles. 
Besides the fathers Austin, the two Gregories, Chrysostom, Basil, 
Epiphanius, Origen, Jerome, and Ambrosius, of whose works, 
with the Platonising Dionysius and Maximus, he gives large 
extracts, he also quotes Yirgil, Cicero, Aristotle, Plinj^, Plato, 
and Boethius ; he details the opinions of Eratosthenes and of 
Pythagoras on some astronomical topics ; he also cites Martianus 
Capella. His knowledge of Greek appears almost in every 
page."* The subtle speculations of Erigena have strongly 
attracted the notice of the most eminent among the modern 
inquirers into the history of opinion and of civilization ; and the 
German Tenneman agrees with the French Cousin and Guizot in 
attributing to them a very extraordinary influence on the phi- 
losophj?- of his own and of succeeding times. To his writings 
and translations it is thought may be traced the introduction into 
the theology and metaphysics of Europe of the later Platonism 
of the Alexandrian school. It is remarkable, as Mr. Moore has 
observed, that the learned Mosheim had previously shown the 
study of the scholastic or Aristotelian philosophy to have been 
also of Irish origin. " That the Hibernians," says that writer, 
" who were called Scots in this [the eighth] century, were 
lovers of learning, and distinguished themselves in these times 
of ignorance by the culture of the sciences beyond all the other 
European nations, travelling through the most distant lands, 
both with a view to improve and to communicate their know- 
ledge, is a fact with which I have been long acquainted ; as we 
see them in the most authentic records of antiquity discharging, 
with the highest reputation and applause, the function of doctor 
in Erance, Germany, and Italy, both during this and the follow- 
ing century. But that these Hibernians were the first teachers 
of the scholastic theology in Europe, and so early as the eighth 
century illustrated the doctrines of religion by the principles of 
philosophy, I learned but lately." f And then he adduces the 
proofs that establish his position. 

* Turner, Anglo-Sax. iii. 393. 

t Translated in Moore's Ireland, i. 302, 



12 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Decay of the Earliest English Scholaeship. 

It should seem not to be altogether correct to attribute the 
decline and extinction of the earliest literary civilization of the 
Angles and Saxons wholly to the Danish invasions. The North- 
men did not make their appearance till towards the close of the 
eighth century, nor did their ravages occasion any considerable 
public alarm till long after the commencement of the ninth ; but 
for a whole century preceding this date, learning in England 
appears to have been falling into decay. Bede, who died in 735^ 
exactly ninety-seven years before that landing of the Danes in the 
Isle of Sheppey, in the reign of Egbert, which was followed by 
incessant attacks of a similar kind, until the fierce marauders at 
last won for themselves a settlement in the country, is the last 
name eminent for scholarship that occurs in this portion of the 
English annals. The historian William of Malmesbury, indeed, 
affirms that the death of Bede was fatal to learning in England, 
and especially to history; "insomuch that it maybe said," he 
adds, writing in the early part of the twelfth century, " that almost 
all knowledge of past events was buried in the same grave with 
him, and hath continued in that condition even to our times." 
" There was not so much as one Englishman," Malmesbury 
declares, "left behind Bede, who emulated the glory which he 
had acquired by his studies, imitated his example, or pursued the 
path to knowledge which he had pointed out. A few, indeed, of 
his successors were good men, and not unlearned, but they 
generally spent their lives in an inglorious silence ; while the 
far greater number sunk into sloth and ignorance, until by 
degrees the love of learning was quite extinguished in this 
island for a long time." 

The devastations of the Danes comple-ted what had probably 
been begun by the dissensions and confusion that attended the 
breaking up of the original political system established by the 
Angles and Saxons, and perhaps also by the natural decay of the 
national spirit among a race long habituated to a stirring and 
adventurous life, and now left in undisturbed ease and quiet 
before the spirit of a new and more intellectual activity had been 
sufficiently diffused among them. Nearly all the monasteries 
and the schools connected with them throughout the land were 
either actually laid in ashes by the northern invaders, or were 
deserted in the general terror and distraction occasioned by their 
attacks. When Alfred was a young man, about the middle of the 
ninth century, he could find no masters to instruct him in any of 
the higher branches of learning : there were at that time, accord- 



DECAY OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP. 13 

ing to his biographer Asser, few or none among the West Saxons 
who had any scholarship, or could so ninch as read with pro- 
priety and ease. The reading of the Latin language is probably 
what is here alluded to. Alfred has himself stated, in the pre- 
face to his translation of Gregory's Pastorale, that, though many 
of the English at his accession could read their native language 
well enough, the knowledge of the Latin tongue was so much 
decayed, that there were very few to the south of the Humber 
who understood the common prayers of the church, or were 
capable of translating a single sentence of Latin into English ; 
and to the south of the Thames he could not recollect that there 
was one possessed of this very moderate amount of learning. 
Contrasting this lamentable state of things with the better da^^s 
that had gone before, he exclaims, " I wish thee to know that it 
comes very often into my mind, what wise men there were in 
England, both laymen and ecclesiastics, and how happy those 
times were to England ! The sacred profession was diligent 
both to teach and to learn. Men from abroad sought wisdom 
and learning in this country, though we must now go out of it to 
obtain knowledge if we should wish to have it." 

It was not till he was nearly forty years of age that Alfred 
himself commenced his study of the Latin language. Before 
this, however, and as soon as he had rescued his dominions from 
the hands of the Danes, and reduced these foreign disturbers to 
subjection, he had exerted himself with his characteristic activity 
in bringing about the restoration of letters as well as of peace 
and order. He had invited to his court all the most learned men 
he could discover anywhere in his native land, and had even 
brought over instructors for himself and his people from other 
countries. Werfrith, the bishop of Worcester; Ethelstan and 
Werwulf, two Mercian priests ; and Plegmund, also a Mercian, 
who afterwards became archbishop, of Canterbury, were some of 
the English of whose superior acquirements he thus took advan- 
tage. Asser he brought from the western extremity of Wales. 
Grimbald he obtained from France, having sent an embassy of 
bishops, presbyters, deacons, and religious laymen, bearing 
valuable presents to his ecclesiastical superior Fulco, the arch- 
bishop of Eheims, to ask permission for the great scholar to be 
allowed to come to reside in England. And so in other instances, 
like the bee, looking everywhere for honey, to quote the simili- 
tude of his biographer, this admirable prince sought abroad in 
all directions for the treasure which his own kingdom did not 
afford. 

Llis labours in translating the various works that have been 



14 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

mentioned above from the Latin, after he had acquired that 
language, he seems himself to have been half inclined to regard 
as to be justified only by the low state into which all learning 
had fallen among his countrymen in his time, and as likely per- 
haps to be rather of disservice than otherwise to the cause of real 
scholarship. Keflecting on the erudition which had existed in 
the country at a former period, and which had made those 
volumes in the learned languages useful that now lay unopened, 
" I wondered greatly," he says in the Preface to his translation 
of the Pastorale, " that of those good wise men w^ho were formerly 
in our nation, and who had all learned fully these books, 
none would translate any part into their own language ; but I 
soon answered myself, and said, they never thought that men 
could be so reckless, and that learning would be so fallen. They 
intentionally omitted it, and wished that there should be more 
wisdom in the land, by many languages being known." He then 
called to recollection, however, what benefit had been derived 
hj all nations from the translation of the Greek and Hebrew 
Scriptures, first into Latin, and then into the various modern 
tongues ; and, " therefore," he concludes, " I think it better, if 
you think so (he is addressing Wulfsig, the bishop of London), 
that we also translate some books, the most necessary for all men 
to know, that we all may know them ; and we may do this, with 
God's help, very easily, if we have peace ; so that all the youth 
that are now in England, who are freemen, and possess suffi- 
cient wealth, may for a time apply to no other task till they 
first well know how to read English. Let those learn Latin 
afterwards, who will know more, and advance to a higher con- 
dition." In this wise and benevolent spirit he acted. The old 
writers seem to state that, besides the translations that have 
come down to us, he executed many others that are now lost. 

It is probable, though there is no sufficient authority for the 
statement, that Alfred re-established many of the old monastic 
and episcopal schools in the various parts of the kingdom. 
Asser expressly mentions that he founded a seminary for the 
sons of the nobility, to the support of which he devoted no less 
than an eighth part of his whole revenue. Hither even some 
noblemen repaired who had far outgrown their youth, but never- 
theless had scarcely or not at all begun their acquaintance with 
books. In another place Asser speaks of this sckool, to which 
Alfred is stated to have sent his own son Ethelward, as being 
attended not only by the sons of almost all the nobility of the realm, 
but also by many of the inferior classes. It was provided with 
several masters. A notion that has been eagerly maintained by 



DECAY OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP. 15 

some antiquaries is, that this seminary, instituted by Alfred, is 
to be considered as the foundation of the University of Oxford. 

Up to this time absolute illiteracy seems to have been com- 
mon even among the highest classes of the English. We have 
just seen that, when Alfred established his schools, they were as 
much needed for the nobility who had reached an advanced or 
mature age as for their children ; and, indeed, the scheme of in- 
struction seems to have been intended from the first to embrace 
the former as well as the latter, for, according to Asser's account, 
every person of rank or substance who, either from age or want 
of capacity, was unable to learn to read himself, was compelled 
to send to school either his son or a kinsman, or, if he had 
neither, a servant, that he might at least be read to by some one. 
The royal charters, instead of the names of the kings, sometimes 
exhibit their marks, used, as it is fiankly explained, in conse- 
quence of their ignorance of letters. 

The measures begun by Alfred for effecting the literary 
civilization of his subjects were probably pursued under his suc- 
cessors ; but the period of the next three quarters of a century, 
notwithstanding some short intervals of repose, was on the whole 
too troubled to admit of much attention being given to the carry- 
ing out of his plans, or even, it may be apprehended, the mainte- 
nance of what he had set up. Dunstan, indeed, during his 
administration, appears to have exerted himself with zeal in 
enforcing a higher standard of learning as well as of morals, or 
of asceticism, among the clergy. But the renewal of the Danish 
wars, after the accession of Ethelred, and the state of misery and 
confusion in which the country was kept from this cause till its 
conquest by Canute, nearly forty years after, must have again 
laid in ruins the greater part of its literary as well as ecclesi- 
astical establishments. The concluding portion of the tenth 
century was thus, probably, a time of as deep intellectual dark- 
ness in England as it was throughout most of the rest of Europe. 
■ Under Canute, however, who was a wise as well as a powerful 
sovereign, the schools no doubt rose again and flourished. We 
have the testimony, so far as it is to be relied upon, of the history 
attributed to Ingulphus, w^hich professes to be written imme- 
diately after the Norman conquest, and the boyhood of the author 
of which is made to coincide with the early part of the reign 
of the Confessor, that at that time seminaries of the higher as 
well as of elementary learning existed in England. Ingulphus, 
according to this account, having been born in the city of 
London, was first sent to school at Westminster ; and from 
Westminster he proceeded to Oxford, where he studied the 



/ 



16 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Aristotelian philosophy and the rhetorical writings of Cicero. 
This is the earliest express mention of the University of Oxford, 
if a passage in Asser's work in which the name occurs be, as is 
generally supposed, spurious, and if the History passing under 
his name was really written by Ingulphus. 

The studies that were cultivated in those ages were few in 
number and of very limited scope. Alcuin, in a letter to his 
patron Charlemagne, has enumerated, in the fantastic rhetoric 
of the period, the subjects in which he instructed his pupils in 
the school of St. Martin at Paris. "To some," says he, "I 
administer the honey of the sacred writings ; others I try to 
inebriate with the wine of the ancient classics. I begin the 
nourishment of some with the apples of grammatical subtlety. 
I strive to illuminate many by the arrangement of the stars, as 
from the painted roof of a lofty palace." In plain language, his 
instructions embraced grammar, the Greek and Latin languages, 
astronomy, and theology. In the poem in which he gives an 
account of his otstl education at York, the same writer informs 
us that the studies there pursued comprehended, besides grammar, 
rhetoric, and poetry, " the harmony of the sky, the labour of the 
sun and moon, the five zones, the seven wandering planets ; the 
laws, risings, and settings of the stars, and the aerial motions 
of the sea ; earthquakes ; the nature of man, cattle, birds, and 
wild beasts, with their various kinds and forms ; and the sacred 
Scriptures." 



The English Language. 



The earliest historically known fact with regard to the English 
language is, that it was the language generally, if not universally, 
spoken by the barbaric invaders, apparently for the greater part 
of one race or blood, though of difterent tribes, who, upon the 
breaking up of the empire of the W est in the fifth century, came ' 
over in successive throngs from the opposite continent, and, after 
a protracted struggle, acquired the possession and dominion of the 
principal portion of the province of Britain. They are stated to 
have consisted chiefly of Angles and Saxons. But, although it is 
usual to designate them rather by the general denomination of 
the Saxons, or Anglo-Saxons, it is probable that the Saxons 
were in reality only a section of the Angles. The Angles, of 
which term our modern English is only another form, appears 
to have been always recognized among themselves as the proper 
national appellation. They both concurred, Angles and Saxons 



THE e:nglish language. 17 

alike, after their establishment in Britain, in calling their com- 
mon country Angle-land, or England, and their common language 
English — that is, the language of the Angles, — as there can be 
little doubt it had been called from the time when it first became 
known as a distinct form of human speech. 

This English language, since become so famous, is ordinarily 
regarded as belonging to the Low-Germanic, or middle, group 
of the Gothic tongues. That is to say, it is classed with the 
Dutch and the Flemish, and the dialects generally of the more 
northern and low-lying part of what was anciently called Ger- 
many, under which name were included the countries that we 
call Holland and the ^Netherlands, as well as that to which it is 
now more especially confined. It appears to have been from 
this middle region, lying directly opposite to Britain, that the 
Angles and Saxons and other tribes by whom the English lan- 
guage was brought over to that island chiefly came. At any 
rate, they certainly did not come from the more elevated region 
of Southern Germany. Kor does the language present the dis- 
tinguishing characteristics of a High-Germanic tongue. What 
is now called the German language, therefore, though of the 
same Gothic stock, belongs to a different branch from our own. 
We are only distantly related to the Germans proper, or the race 
among whom the language and literature now known as the 
German have originated and grown up. We are, at least in 
respect of language, more nearly akin to the Dutch and the 
Fleniings than we are to the Germans, It may even be doubted 
if the English language ought not to be regarded as having more 
of a Scandinavian than of a purely Germanic character, — as, in 
other words, more nearly resembling the Danish or Swedish 
than the modern German. The invading bands by whom it was 
originally brought over to Britain in the fifth and sixth cen- 
turies were in all probability drawn in great part from the 
Scandinavian countries. At a later date, too, the population of 
England was directly recruited from Denmark, and the other 
regions around the Baltic to a large extent. IProm about the 
middle of the ninth century the population of all the eastern and 
northern parts of the country was as much Danish as English. 
And soon after the beginning of the eleventh century the sove- 
reignty was acquired by the Danes. 

The English language, although reckoned among modern lan- 
guages, is already of resjjectable antiquity. In one sense, indeed, 
all languages may be held to be equally ancient ; for we can in 
no case get at the beginning of a language, any more than we 
can get at the beginning of a lineage. Each is merely the con- 

c 



18 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tinuation of a preceding one, from which it cannot be separated 
in any case except by a purely arbitrary mark of distinction. 
Take two portions of the line at some distance from one another, 
and they may be very unlike ; yet the change which has trans- 
formed the one into the other, or produced the one out of the 
other, has been, even when most active, so gradual, so perfectly 
free always from anything that can be called a convulsion or 
catastrophe, so merely a process of growth, however varying in 
its rate of rapidity, that there is no precise point at which it can 
be said to have begun. This is undoubtedly the way in which 
all languages have come into existence ; they have all thus grown 
out of older forms of speech ; none of them have been manufac- 
tured or invented. It would seem that human skill could as 
soon invent a tree as invent a language. The one as well as the 
other is essentially a natural production. 

But, taking a particular language to mean what has always 
borne the same name, or been spoken by the same nation or 
race, which is the common or conventional understanding of the 
matter, the English may claim to be older than the great majority 
of the tongues now in u.se throughout Europe. The Basque, 
perhaps, and the various Celtic dialects might take precedence 
of it ; but hardly any others. No one of the still spoken Ger- 
manic or Scandinavian languages could make out a distinct proof 
of its continuous existence from an equally early date. And the 
Romance tongues, the Italian, the Spanish, the French, are all, 
recognized as such, confessedly of much later origin. 

The English language is recorded to have been known by 
that name, and to have been the national speech of the same 
race, at least since the middle of the fifth century. It was 
then, as we have seen, that the first settlers by whom it was 
spoken established themselves in the country of which their 
descendants have ever since retained possession. Call them 
either Angles (that is, English) or Saxons, it makes no differ- 
ence ; it is clear that, whether or no the several divisions of the 
invaders were all of one blood, all branches of a common stock, 
they spoke all substantially the same language, the proper nam.e 
of which, as has been stated, was the Anglish, or English, as 
England, or Angle-land (the land of the Angles), was the nama 
which the country received from its new occupants. And these, 
names of England and English the country and the language have 
each retained ever since. 

^ Nor can it be questioned that the same tongue was spoken hj 
the same race, or races, long before their settlement in Britain. 
The Angles figure as one of the nations occupying the forest land 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 19 

of Germany in the picture of that country sketched by Tacitus 
in the first century of our era. 

The most distinct and satisfactory record, however, of a lan- 
guage is afforded by what exists of it in a M^ritten form. In 
applying this test or measure of antiquity, the reasonable rule 
would seem to be, that, wherever we have the clear beginning 
or end of a distinct body or continuous series of literary remains, 
there we have the beginning or end of a language. Thus, of 
what is called the Moesogothic we have no written remains 
of later date than the fourth century (or, at any rate, than the 
sixth, if we reckon from what is probably the true age of the 
transcripts which we actually possess) ; and accordingly we 
hold the Moesogothic to be a language which has passed away 
and perished, notwithstanding that there may be some other lan- 
guage or languages still existing of which there is good reason 
to look upon it as having been the progenitor. But of the 
English language we have a continuous succession of written 
remains since the seventh century at least ; that is to say, we 
have an array of specimens of it from that date such as that no 
two of them standing next to one another in the order of time 
could possibly be pronounced to belong to different languages, 
but only at most to two successive stages of the same language. 
They afford us a record or representation of the language in 
which there is no gap. This cannot be said of any other existing 
European tongue for nearly so great a length of time, unless we 
may except the two principal Celtic tongues, the Welsh and the 
Irish. 

The movement of the language, however, during this extended 
existence, has been immense. Ko language ever ceases to move 
until it becomes what is called dead, which term, although com- 
monly understood to mean merely that the language has ceased 
to be spoken, really signifies, here as elsewhere, that the life is 
gone out of it, which is indeed the unfailing accompaniment 
of its ceasing to be used as an oral medium of communication. 
It cannot grow after that, even if it should still continue to a 
certain extent to be used in writing, as has been the case with 
the Sanscrit in the East and the Latin in the West, — except 
perhaps as the hair and the nails are said sometimes to grow- 
after the animal body is dead. It is only speaking that keeps 
a language alive ; writing alone will not do it. That has no 
more than a conservative function and effect; the progressive 
power, the element of fermentation and change, in a language 
is its vocal utterance. 

W^e shall find that the English language, moving now faster, 



20 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

now slower, throughout the twelve or thirteen centuries over 
which our knowledge of it extends, although it has never been 
all at once or suddenly converted from one form into another — 
which is what the nature of human speech forbids — has j-et 
within that space undergone at least two complete revolutions, 
or; in other words, presents itself to us in three distinct forms. 



Original English : — 
COMMONLY CALLED SAXON, OR ANGLOS A XOJST. 

The English which the Angles and Saxons brought over with 
them from the Continent, when they came and took possession 
of the greater part of South Britain in the fifth and sixth cen- 
turies, differed from the English that we now speak and write 
in two important respects. It was an unmixed language ; and it 
was what is called a synthetic, in contradistinction to an anal^'iic, 
language. Its vocables were all of one stock or lineage ; and it 
expressed the relations of nouns and verbs, not by separate 
words, called auxiliaries and particles, but by terminational or 
other modifications, — that is, by proper conjugation and de- 
clension, — as our present English still does when it says, / loved 
instead of / did love, or 2'he King's throne instead of Tlie throne of the 
King. These two characteristics are what constitute it a distinct 
form, or stage, of the language : — its synthetic or generally in- 
flected grammatical structure, and its homogeneous vocabulary. 

As a subject of philological study the impoitance of this 
earliest known form of the English language cannot be over- 
estimated ; and much of what we possess wiitten in it is also 
of great value for the matter. But the essential element of a 
literature is not matter, but manner. Here too, as in everything 
else, the soul of the artistic is form ; — beauty of form. Now of 
that what has come down to us written in this primitive English 
is, at least for us of the present day, wholly or all but wholly 
destitute. 

There is much writing in forms of human speech now extinct, or 
no longer in oral use, which is still intelligible to us in a certain 
sort, but in a certain sort only. It speaks to us as anything that 
is dead can speak to us, and no otherwise. We can decipher it, 
rather than read it. \\e make it out as it were merely by the touch, 
getting some such notion of it as a blind man might get of a piece 
of sculpture by passing his hand over it. This, for instance, to 
take an extreme case, is the position in which we stand in 
reference to the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the ancient menu- 



ORIGINAL ENGLISH. 21 

ments of Egypt. They can be read as the multiplication table 
can be read. But that is all. There may be nothing more in 
them than there is in the multiplication table ; but if there were, 
we could not get at it. M. Champollion, indeed, in his enthu- 
siasm, saw a vision of an amatory or bacchanalian song laughing 
under the venerable veil of one of them ; but it is plain that this 
must have been an illusion. A mummy from one of the neigh- 
bouring tombs, embalmed some three or four thousand years 
ago, might almost as soon be expected to give forth a living 
voice. 

Even the ancient Assyrian inscriptions, which are in alpha- 
betical characters, will certainly never be made to render up to 
us more than the dead matters of fact that may be wrapt up 
in them. If there be any grace in the manner in which the facts 
are related, any beauty of stjde in the narrative, it has perished 
irretrievably. But this is what also appears to happen, in a 
greater or less degree, in the case even of a language the vocabu- 
lary of which we have completely in our possession, and which we 
are therefore quite able to interpret so far as regards the substance 
of anything written in it, whenever it has for some time — for a 
single generation, it may be — ceased both to be spoken and to be 
written. Something is thus lost, which seems to be irrecover- 
able. The two great classic tongues, it is to be observed, the 
old Greek and Latin, although they have both long passed out of 
popular use, have always continued to be not only studied and 
read by all cultivated minds throughout Europe, but to be also 
extensively employed by the learned, at least in writing. And 
this has proved enough to maintain the modern world in what 
may be called a living acquaintance with them — such an ac- 
quaintance as we have with a person we have conversed with, 
or a place where we have actually been, as distinguished from 
our dimmer conception of persons and places known to us only 
by description. The ancient classic literature charms us as well 
as informs us. It addresses itself to the imagination, and to our 
sense of the beautiful, as well as to the understanding. It has 
shape, and colour, and voice for us, as well as mere substance. 
Every word, and every collocation of words, carries with it a 
peculiar meaning, or effect, which is still appreciated. The 
whole, in short, is felt and enjoyed, not simply interpreted. 
But a language, which has passed from what we may call its 
natural condition of true and full vitality as a national speech 
cannot, apparently, be thus far preserved, with something of the 
pulse of life still beating in it, merely by such a knowledge of 
it being kept up as enables us to read and translate it. Still less 



22 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

can a language, the very reading of which has been for a time 
suspended, and consequently all knowledge whatever of it for- 
gotten, ever be restored to even the appearance of life. It has 
become a fossil, and cannot be resuscitated, but only dug up. A 
thousand facts warrant us in saying that languages, and even 
words, are subject to decay and dissolution as well as the human 
beings of whose combined mental and physical organizations they 
are the mysterious product ; and that, once really dead, nothing 
can reanimate their dust or reclothe their dry bones with flesh. 

The original form of the English language is in this state. It 
is intelligible, but that is all. What is written in it can, in a 
certain sense, be read, but not so as to bidng out from the most 
elaborate compositions in it any artistic element, except of the 
most dubious and unsatisfactory kind. Either such an element 
is not present in any considerable degree, or the language is not 
now intimately enough known for any one to be able to detect it. 
If it is not literally dumb, its voice has for us of the present day 
entirely lost its music. Even of the system of measure and ar- 
rangemeut according to which it is ordinarily disposed for the 
purposes of poetry we have no proper apprehension or feeling. 
Certain mechanical principles or rules may have been discovered 
in obedience to which the versification appears to be constructed ; 
but the verse as verse remains not the less for our ears and hearts 
wholly voiceless. When it can be distinguished from prose at 
all it is only by certain marks or characteristics which may 
indeed be perceived by the eye, or counted on the fingers, but 
which have no expression that excites in us any mental emotion. 
It is little better than if the composition merely had the words 
" This is verse " written over it or under it. 

In respect of everything else appertaining to the soul of the 
language, our understanding of it is about equally imj^erfect. 
The consequence is, that, although it can be translated, it cannot 
be written. The late Mr. Conybeare, indeed, has left us a few 
specimens of verse in it of his own composition; but his at- 
tempts are of the slightest character, and, unadventurous as they 
are, nobody can undertake to say, except as to palpable points of 
right or wrong in grammar, whether they are well or ill done. 
The language, though so far in our hands as to admit of being 
analyzed in grammars and packed up in dictionaries, is not 
recoverable in such a degree as to make it possible to pronounce 
with certainty whether anything written in it is artistically 
good or bad. As for learning to speak it, that is a thing as 
little dreamt of as learning to speak the language of Swift's 
Houyhnhnms. 



ORIGINAL ENGLISH. 23 

When the study of this original form of the national speech 
was revived in England in the middle of the sixteenth century, 
it had been for well-nigh four hundred years not only what is 
commonly called a dead language, but a buried and an utterly 
forgotten one. It may be questioned if at least for three pre- 
ceding centuries any one had been able to read it. It was first 
recurred to as a theological weapon. Much in the same manner 
as the Eeformers generally were drawn to the study of the 
Greek language in maintaining the accordance of their doc- 
trines with those of the Kew Testament and of the first ages 
of Christianity, the English Eeformers turned to the oldest 
writings in the vernacular tongue for evidence of the com- 
paratively unromanized condition of the early English church. 
In the next age history and law began to receive illustration 
from the same source. It was not till a considerably later date 
that the recovered language came to be studied with much of a 
special view to its litera,ry and philological interest. And it is 
only within the present century that it has either attracted any 
attention in other countries, or been investigated on what are 
now held to be sound principles. The specially theological 
period of its cultivation may be regarded as extending over the 
latter half of the sixteenth century, the legal and historical 
period over the whole of the seventeenth, the philological of the 
old school over the whole of the eighteenth, and the philological 
of the modern school over the nineteenth, so far as it has gone. 

If the English language as it was written a thousand years 
ago had been left to itself, and no other action from without had 
interfered with that of its spontaneous growth or inherent prin- 
ciples of change and development, it might not have remained 
so stationary as some more highly-cultivated languages have 
done throughout an equal space of time, but its form in the 
nineteenth century would in all probability have been only a 
comparatively slight modification of what it was in the ninth. 
It would have been essentially the same language. As the case 
stands, the English of the ninth century is one language, and 
the English of the nineteenth . century another. They differ at 
least as much as the Italian difi'ers from the Latin, or as English 
differs from German. The most familiar acquaintance with the 
one leaves the other unintelligible. So much is this so that it 
has long been customary to distinguish them by different names, 
and to call the original form of the national speech Saxon, or 
Anglo-Saxon, as if it were not English at all. If the notion be 
that the dialect in which most of the ancient English that has 
come down to us is written in that which was in use among the 



24 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

specially Saxon part of the popnlation, that would have been 
better indicated by calling it, not Anglo-Saxon, but Saxon 
English. But even such a designation would be inapplicable to 
those specimens of the language in which there is unquestion- 
ably nothing whatever that is specially Saxon, and which recent 
investigations have shown to be not inconsiderable in amount, as 
well as of high philological importance ; and it would also leave 
the limitation of the name English to the more modern form of the 
language without any warrant in the facts of the case. Objec- 
tionable, however, as may be the common nomenclature, it is 
still indisputable that we have here, for all practicable purposes, 
not one language, but two languages. The one may have grown 
out of the other, and no doubt has done so at least in part or in 
the main; but in part also the modern language is of quite a 
distinct stock from the ancient. Of English Literature, there- 
fore, and the English Language, commonly so called, the language 
and literature of the Angles and Saxons before the twelfth century 
make no proper part. 



The Norman Conquest, 

The year 1066 is memorable as that of the Norman Conquest, 
— the conquest of England by the Normans. The conquests of 
which we read in the history of nations are of three kinds. 
Sometimes one population has been overwhelmed by or driven 
before another as it might have been by an inundation of the 
sea, or at the most a small number of the old inhabitants of the 
invaded territory have been permitted to remain on it as the 
bondsmen of their conquerors. This appears to have been the 
usual mode of proceeding of the barbarous races, as we call 
them, by which the greater part of Europe was occupied in early 
times, in their contests with one another. When the Teuton or 
Goth from the one side of the Ehine attacked the Celt on the 
other side, the whole tribe precipitated itself upon what was the 
object at once of its hostility and of its cupidity. Or even if it 
was one division of the great Gothic race that made war upon 
another, as, for instance, the Scandinavian upon any Germanic 
country, the course that was taken was commonly, or at least 
frequently, the same. The land was cleared by driving away 
all who could fly, and the universal massacre of the rest. This 
primitive kind of invasion and conquest belonged properly to the 
night of barbarism, but in certain of the extreme parts of the 
European system something of it survived down to a compara- 
tively late date. Much that we are told of the manner in which 



THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 25 

Britain was wrested from its previous Celtic occupants by the 
Angles and Saxons in tlie fifth and sixth centuries of our era 
would lead us to think that the enterprise of these invaders was 
both originally conceived and conducted throughout in this 
spirit. Nay, for some centuries after this we have the Danes in 
their descents and inroads upon all parts of the British territories 
still acting, apparently, in the same style. But, ever from the 
time of the settlement of the barbarous nations in the more 
central province-s of the old Eoman empire, another kind of 
conquest had come into use among them. Corrupted and 
enfeebled as it was, the advanced civilization which they now 
encountered seems to have touched them as with a spell, or 
rather could not but communicate to its assailants something of 
its own spirit. A policy of mere destruction was evidently not 
the course to be adopted here. The value of the conquest lay 
mainly in preserving as far as possible both the stupendous 
material structures and the other works of art by which the soil 
was everywhere covered and adorned, and the living in- 
telligence and skill of which all these wonders were the pro- 
duct. Hence the second kind of conquest, in which for the 
first time the conquerors were contented to share the conquered 
country, usually according to a strictly defined proportional 
division, with its previous occupants. But this system too was 
only transitory. It passed away with the particular crisis which 
gave birth to it ; and then arose the third and last kind of 
conquest, in which there is no general occupation of the soil of 
the conquered country by the conquerors, but only its dominion 
is acquired by them. 

The first of the three kinds of conquest, then, has for its object 
and efiect the complete displacement of the ancient inhabitants. 
It is the kind which is proper to the contests of barbarians with 
barbarians. Under the second form of conquest the conquerors, 
recognizing a superiority to themselves in many other things 
even in those whom their superior force or ferocity has subdued, 
feel that they will gain most by foregoing something of their 
right to the wholesale seizure and appropriation of the soil, and 
neither wholly destroying or expelling its ancient possessors, nor 
even reducing them to a state of slavery, but only treating them 
as a lower caste. This is the form proper and natural to the ex- 
ceptional and rare case of the conquest of a civilized by a bar- 
barous people. Finally, there is that kind of subjugation of one 
people or country by another which results simply in the over- 
throw of the independence of the former, and the substitution in 
it or over it of a foreign for a native government. This is gene- 



26 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

rally tlie only kind of conquest wHcli attends upon the wars of 
civilized nations with one another. 

The conquest of England by the Normans in the year 1066 
may be regarded as having been professedly a conquest of this 
last description. The age of both the first and the second kinds 
of conquest was over, at least everywhere throughout Europe 
except it may be only along some few portions of its extreme 
northern boundary. Both the English and the Normans stood 
indisputably within the pale of civilization, the former boasting 
the possession both of Christianitj^ and of a national literature for 
four or five centuries, the latter, if more recently reclaimed from 
paganism and barbarism, nevertheless already recogTiized as one 
of the most brilliantly gifted of European races, and distinguished 
for their superior aptitude in the arts both of war and of peace, 
of polity and of song. And the Norman leader, having with 
him in his enterprise the approval and sanction of the Church, 
claimed the English crown as his by right ; nor were there pro- 
bably wanting many Englishmen, although no doubt the general 
national feeling was different, who held his claim to be fully as 
good in law and justice as that of his native competitor. In 
taking the style of the Conqueror with respect to England, as he 
had been wont to take that of the Bastard with reference to his 
ancestral Normandy, William, as has been often explained, 
probably meant nothing more than that he had acquired his 
English sovereignty for himself, by the nomination or bequest 
of his relation King Edward, or in whatever other way, and had 
not succeeded to it under the ordinary rule of descent. Such a 
right of property is still, in the old feudal language, technically 
described in the law of Scotland as acquired by conquest, and in 
that of England by purchase, which is etymologically of the 
same meaning, — the one word being the Latin Conqucsstus,^ or 
Conquisitio, the other Perquisitio. ^ 

And in point of fact the Normans never transferred themselves 
in a body, or generally, to England. They did not, like the 
barbarous populations of a preceding age, abandon for this new 
country the one in which they had previously dwelt. England 
was never thus taken possession of by the Normans. It was 
never colonized by these foreigners, or occupied by them in any 
other than a military sense. The Norman Duke invaded it with 
an army, raised partly among his own subjects, partly drawn from 
other regions of the Continent, and so made himself master of it. 
It received a foreign government, but not at all a new population. 

Two causes, however, meeting from opposite points, and work- 
ing together, soon produced a result which was to some extent 



THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 27 

the same tliat would have been produced by a Norman coloniza- 
tion. The first was the natural demand on the part of William's 
followers or fellow-soldiers for a share in the profits and advan- 
tages of their common enterprise, which would probably in any 
case have compelled him eventually to surrender his new sub- 
jects to spoliation ; the second was the equally natural restless- 
ness of the latter under the foreign yoke that had been imposed 
upon them, by which they only facilitated the process of their 
general reduction to poverty and ruin. 

And to the overthrow thus brought about of the native civiK- 
zation was added, in the present case, the intrusion of another 
system of social organization, and of another language possessing 
also its own literature, to take the place of what was passing 
away. So that here again were two distinct forces harmoniously, 
though by movements in ox^posite directions, co-operating to a 
common end. At the same time that English culture shrunk 
and faded, Norman culture flourished and advanced. And the 
two forces were not balanced or in any way connected, but quite 
independent the one of the other. English culture went down, 
not under the disastrous influence of the rival light, but from the 
failure of its own natural aliment, or because the social structure 
of which it was the product had been smitten with universal dis- 
organization. It was the withering of life throughout the whole 
frame that made the eye dim. 

The diff"erence, then, between the case of England conquered 
by the Normans in the eleventh century and that of Italy over- 
run by the Goths in the fifth, was twofold. First, the Normans 
did not settle in England, as the barbarous nations of the North 
did in Italy and other provinces of the subjugated Western em- 
pire ; but, secondly, on the other hand, the new power which 
the Norman invasion and conquest of England established in the 
country was not a barbarism, but another civilization in most 
respects at least as advanced as the indigenous one ; — if younger, 
only therefore the stronger and more aspiring, and yet, as it 
proved, not difi"ering so far from that with which it was brought 
into competition as to be incapable of coalescing with it, if need 
were, as well as, in other circumstances, with its advantages of 
position, outshining it or casting it into the shade. 

In this way it came to pass that the final result to both the 
language and the literature of the conquered people was pretty 
much the same in the two cases. What the barbaric influence, 
in its action upon the Latin language and literature, wanted of 
positive vital force it made up for by its mass and weight ; the 
Norman influence, on the contrary, compensated by quality for 



28 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

its deficiency in quantity. There was considerable difference, 
however, in the process by which tlie transformation was effected 
in the two cases, and in the length of time which it occupied. 
The Gothic barbarism was in the first instance simply destruc- 
tive ; it was not till after some centuries that it came to be visiblj^ 
or appreciably anything else. But the Norman influence, in 
virtue of being that, not of a barbarism, but of a civilization, 
and especially of a civilization still in all the radiant bloom and 
buoyant pride of youth, never could have been directly de- 
structive ; from the first moment of their actual contact it 
must have communicated to the native civilization something 
of new life. 

One thing further may be noted. In both the cases that we 
have been comparing the result was the combination, both in the 
language and the literature, of the same two elements ; namely, 
the Latin (or Classical) and the Gothic (or Germanic, in the 
largest sense). But the important difference was, that, the basis 
of the combination remaining in each case what it originally 
was, — Latin in Italy, in France, in Spain, but Gothic in Eng- 
land — while the language and literature that grew up in each of 
the former countries came to be in general spirit and character 
what is called Romance, which must be understood to mean 
modified Roman, the English language and literature retained 
their original fundamentally Gothic character, only modified by 
so much as it has absorbed of a Latin element. 

And the remarkable distinction of the English language is, 
that it is the only one of all the languages of the European 
world which, thus combining the two elements of the Classic 
and the Gothic — that is, as we may say, of ancient and of 
modern civilization — is Gothic, or modern, in its skeleton, or 
bony sj^stem, and in its formative principle, and Classic, or 
antique, only in what of it is comparatively superficial and 
non-essential. The other living European languages are either 
without the Classic element altogether, as are all those of the 
Scandinavian and Teutonic branches, or have it as their principal 
and governing element, as is the case with the Italian, the 
French, and the Spanish, which may all be described as only 
modernized forms of the Latin. Even in the proportion, too, 
in which the two elements are combined the English has greatly 
the advantage over these Romance tongues, as they are called, 
in none of which is there more than a mere sprinkling of the 
modern element, whereas in English, although here that con- 
stitutes the dominant or more active portion of the compound, the 
counterpoising ingredient is also present in large quantity, and 



ARABIC AND OTHER NEW LEARNING 29 

is influential to a very high degree upon the general character 
of the language. 

It should seem to follow from all this, that, both in its inner 
spirit and in its voice, both in its constructional and in its mu- 
sical genius, the English language, and, through that, English 
literature, English civilization or culture generally, and the 
whole temper of the English mind, ought to have a capacity of 
sympathizing at once with the Classical and the Gothic, with the 
antique and the modern, with the past and the present, to an ex- 
tent not to be matched by any other speech or nation of Europe. 
It so happens, too, that the political fortunes of this English 
tongue have been in singular accordance with its constitution 
and natural adaptation, inasmuch as, at the same time that it 
stands in this remarkable position in the Old World, its position 
is still more pre-eminent in the Is ew World, whether that desig- 
nation be confined to the continent of America or understood as 
including the entire field of modern colonization in every quarter 
of the globe. The English are the only really colonizing people 
now extant. As we remember Coleridge once expressing it, it is 
the natural destiny of their country, as an island, to be the mother 
of nations. Their geographical position, concurring with their 
peculiar genius, and with all the other favourable circumstances 
of the case, gives them the command of the readiest access to the 
most distant parts of the earth, — a universal highway, almost as 
free as is the air to the swarming bees. And, accordingly, all 
the greatest communities of the future, whether they be seated 
beyond the Atlantic or beyond the Pacific, promise to be com- 
munities of English blood and English speech. 



Arabic and other New Learning. 
The space of about a thousand years, extending from the over- 
throw of the Western Eoman empire, in the middle of the fifth 
century, to that of the Eastern, in the middle of the fifteenth, 
may be divided into two nearly equal paits ; the first of which 
may be considered as that of the gradual decline, the second as 
that of the gradual revival of letters. The former, reaching to the 
close of the tenth century, nearly corresponds, in its close as well 
as in its commencement, with the domination in England of the 
Angles and Saxons. In Europe generally, throughout this long 
space of time, the intellectual darkness, notwithstanding some 
brief and partial revivals, deepens more and more on the whole, 
in the same manner as in the natural day the gray of evening passes 
into the gloom of midnight. The Latin learning, properly so called, 



30 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

may be regarded as terminating with. BoetMus, who wrote in the 
early part of the sixtli century. The Latin language, however, 
continued to be used in literary compositions, as well as in the 
services of tbe Church, both, in our own country and in the other 
parts of Europe that had composed the old empire of Eome. 

The Danisb conquest of England, as completed by the acces- 
sion of Canute, preceded the Norman by exactly half a century, 
and throughout this space, the country had, with little interrup- 
tion, enjoyed a government which, if not always national, — and 
it was that too for rather more than half of the fifty years— was 
at any rate acknowledged and submitted to by the whole nation. 
The public tranquillity was scarcely ever disturbed for more 
than a moment by any internal commotion, and never at all by 
attacks from abroad. During this interval, therefore, many- of 
the monastic and other schools that had existed in the days 
of Alfred, Athelstan, and Edgar, but had been swept away or 
allowed to fall into decay in the disastrous forty years that suc- 
ceeded the decease of the last-mentioned monarch, were probably 
re-established. The more frequent communication with the 
Continent that began in the reign of the Confessor must also 
have been favourable to the intellectual advancement of the 
country. The dawn of the revival of letters in England, there- 
fore, may be properly dated from a point about fifty years ante- 
cedent to the Norman Conquest, or from not very long after the 
commencement of the eleventh century. 

Still at the date of the Conquest the country was undoubtedly 
in regard to everything intellectual in a very backward state. 
Ordericus Yitalis, almost a contemporary writer, and himself a 
native of England, though educated abroad, describes his 
countrymen generally as having been found by the Normans a 
rustic and almost illiterate people {agrestes et pene illiteratos). The 
last epithet may be understood as chiefly intended to characterize 
the clergy, for the great body of the laity at this time Avere 
everj'-where illiterate. A few years after the Conquest, the king 
took advantage of the general illiteracy of the native clergy to 
deprive great numbers of them of their benefices, and to supply 
their places with foreigners. His real or his only motive for 
making this substitution may possibly not have been that which 
he avowed ; but he would scarcely have alleged what was 
notoriously not the fact, even as a pretence. 

The Norman Conquest introduced a new state of things in 
this as in most other respects. That event made England, as it 
were, a part of the Continent, where, not long before, a revival 
of letters had taken place scarcely less remarkable, if we take 



ARABIC AND OTHER NEW LEARNING. 31 

into consideration the circumstances of the time, than the next 
great revolution of the same kind in the beginning of the 
fifteenth century. In France, indeed, the learning that had 
flourished in the time of Charlemagne had never undergone so 
great a decay as had befallen that of England since the days of 
Alfred. The schools planted by Alcuin and the philosophy 
taught by Erigena had both been perpetuated b}^ a line of the 
disciples and followers of these distinguished masters, which had 
never been altogether interrupted. But in the tenth century 
this learning of the West had met and been intermixed with a 
new learning originally from the East, but obtained directl}^ 
from the Arab conquerors of Spain. The Arabs had first become 
acquainted with the literature of Greece in the beginning of the 
eighth century, and it instantly exercised upon their minds an 
awakening influence of the same powerful kind with that with 
which it again kindled Europe seven centuries afterwards. One 
difference, however, between the two cases is very remarkable. 
The mighty effects that arose out of the second revival of the 
ancient Greek literature in the modern world were produced 
almost solely by its eloquence and poetry ; but these were pre- 
cisely the parts of it that were neglected by the Arabs. The 
Greek books which they sought after with such extraordinary 
avidity were almost exclusively those that lelated either to 
metaphysics and mathematics on the one hand, or to medicine, 
chemistry, botany, and the other departments of physical know- 
ledge, on the other. All Greek works of these descriptions that 
they could procure they not only translated into their own 
language, but in course of time illustrated with voluminous 
commentaries. The prodigious magnitude to which this Arabic 
literature eventually grew will stagger the reader who has 
adopted the common notion with regard to what are called the 
middle or the dark ages. " The royal library of the Fatimites" 
(sovereigns of Egypt), says Gibbon, " consisted of 100,000 manu- 
scripts, elegantly transcribed and splendidly bound, which were 
lent, without jealousy or avarice, to the students of Cairo. Yet 
this collection must appear moderate if we can believe that the 
Ommiades of Spain had foimed a library of 600,000 volumes, 
44 of which were employed in the mere catalogues. Their 
capital Cordova, with the adjacent towns of Malaga, Almeria, 
and Murcia, had given birth to more than 300 writers, and above 
70 public libraries were opened in the cities of the Andalusian 
kingdom."* The difficulty we have in conceiving the existence 
of a state of things such as that here described arises in great part 
* Decliue and Fall of the Rom. Emp. c. lii. 



82 ENGLISH LITERATORE AND LANGUAGE. 

from the circumstance of the entire disappearance now, and for so 
long a period, of all this Arabic power and splendour from the 
scene of European affairs. But, long extinct as it has been, the 
dominion of the Arabs in Europe was no mere momentary blaze. 
It lasted, with little diminution, for nearly five hundred years, 
a period as long as from the age of Chaucer to the present 
day, and abundantly sufficient for the growth of a body of 
literature and science even of the wonderful extent that has 
been described. In the tenth century Arabic Spain was the 
fountain-head of learning in Europe. Thither students were 
accustomed to repair from every other country to study in the 
Ai'abic schools ; and many of the teachers in the chief towns of 
France and Italy had finished their education in these semi- 
naries, and were now diffusing among their countrymen the new 
knowledge which they had thence acquired. The writings of 
several of the Greek authors, also, and especially those of Aris- 
totle, had been made generally known to scholars by Latin 
versions of them made from the Arabic. 

There is no trace of this new literature having found its way 
to England before the Norman Conquest. But that revolution 
immediately brought it in its train. " The Conqueror himself," 
observes a writer who has illustrated this subject with a pro- 
fusion of curious learning, "patronized and loved letters. He 
filled the bishoprics and abbacies of England with the most 
learned of his countrymen, who had been educated at the 
University of Paris, at that time the most flourishing school in 
Europe. He placed Lanfranc, abbot of the monastery of St. 
Stephen at Caen, in the see of Canterbury — an eminent master 
of logic, the subtleties of which he employed with great dex- 
terity in a famous controversy concerning the real presence. 
Anselm, an acute metaphysician and theologian, his immediate 
successor in the same see, was called from the government of the 
abbey of Bee, in Normandy. Herman, a Norman, bishop of Salis- 
bury, founded a noble library in the ancient cathedral of that 
see. Many of the Norman prelates preferred in England by the 
Conqueror were polite scholars. Godfrey, prior of St. Swithin's 
at Winchester, a native of Cambray, was an elegant Latin epi- 
grammatist, and wrote with the smartness and ease of Martial ; a 
circumstance which, by the way, shows that the literature of the 
monks at this period was of a more liberal cast than that which 
we commonly annex to their character and profession." * Geoffrey, 
also, another learned Norman, came over from the University of 

* Warton's Dissertation on Introduction of Learning into England, prefixed 
to History of Enghsh Poetry, p. cxii. (edit, of 1840). 



ARABIC AND OTHER NE^V LEARNING. 33 

Paris, and established a school at Dimstable, where, according to 
Matthew Paris, he composed a play, calle-d the Play of St. 
Catharine, which was acted by his scholars, dressed character- 
istically in copes borrowed from the sacrist of the neighbouring 
abbey of St. Albans, of which Geoffrey afterwards became abbot. 
" The king himself," Warton continues, "gave no small counte- 
nance to the clergy, in sending his son Henry Beauclerc to the 
abbey of Abingdon, where he was initiated in the sciences under 
the care of the abbot Grimbald, and Faritius, a physician of 
Oxford. Eobert d'Oilly, constable of Oxford Castle, was ordered 
to pay for the board of the young prince in the convent, which 
the king himself frequently visited. Kor was William wanting 
in giving ample revenues to learning. He founded the mag- 
nificent abbeys of Battle and Selby, with other smaller convents. 
His nobles and their successors co-operated with this liberal 
spirit in erecting many monasteries. Herbert de Losinga, a 
monk of Normandy, bishop of Thetford in Norfolk, instituted 
and endowed with large possessions a Benedictine abbey at Nor- 
wich, consisting of sixt}^ monks. To mention no more instances, 
such great institutions of persons dedicated to religious and 
literary leisure, while they diffused an air of civility, and soft- 
ened the manners of the people in their respective circles, must 
aave afforded powerful incentives to studious pursuits, and have 
consequently added no small degree of stability to the interests 
of learning."* 

To this it may be added, that most of the successors of the 
Conqueror continued to show the same regard for learning of 
which he had set the example. Nearly all of them had them- 
selves received a learned education. Besides Henry Beauclerc, 
Henry II., whose father Geoffrey Plantagenet, Earl of Anjou, 
was famous for his literary acquirements, had been carefully 
educated under the superintendence of his admirable uncle, the 
Earl of Gloucester ; and he appears to have taken care that his 
children should not want the advantages he had himself enjoyed ; 
for at least the three eldest, Henry, Geoffrey, and Eichard, are 
all noted for their literary as well as their other accomplishments. 

What learning existed, however, was still for the most part 
confined to the clergy. Even the nobility — although it cannot 
be supposed that they were left altogether without literary in- 
struction — appear to have been very rarely initiated in any of 
those branches which were considered as properly constituting 
the scholarship of the times. The familiar knowledge of the 

* Ibid. Some inacciiracies in "Warton's account of Geoffrey and his play are 
corrected from a note by Mr. Douce. 

D 



34 EA^GLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Latin language in particular, which was then the key to all 
other erudition, seems to have been almost exclusively confined 
to churchmen, and to those few of the laity who embraced the 
profession of schoolmasters, as some, at least on the Continent, 
were now wont to do. The contemporary writer of a Life of 
Becket relates, that when Henry 11. , in 1164, sent an embassy 
to the Pope, in which the Earl of Arundel and three other 
noblemen were associated with an archbishop, four bishops, and 
three of the royal chaplains, four of the churchmen, at the 
audience to which the}- were admitted, first delivered themselves 
in as many Latin harangues ; and then the Earl of Arundel stood 
up, and made a speech in English, which he began with the 
words, " We, who are illiterate laymen, do not understand one 
word of what the bishops have said to your holiness." 

The notion that learning properly belonged exclusively to the 
clergy, and that it was a possession in which the laity were 
unworthy to participate, was in some degree the common belief 
of the age, and by the learned themselves was almost universally 
held as an article of faith that admitted of no dispute. Xothing 
can be more strongly marked than the tone of contempt which is 
expressed for the mass of the community, the unlearned vulgar, 
by the scholars of this period : in their correspondence with one 
another especially, they seem to look upon all beyond their own 
small circle as beings of an inferior species. This pride of theii-s, 
however, worked beneficially upon the whole : in the first place, 
it was in great part merely a proper estimation of the advantages 
of knowledge over ignorance ; and, secondly, it helped to make 
the man of the pen a match for him of the sword — the natural 
liberator of the human race for its natural oppressor. At the 
same time, it intimates very forcibly at once the comparative 
rarity of the highly prized distinction, and the depth of the 
darkness that still reigned far and wide around the few scattered 
points of light. 

Schools and Universities. 

Schools and other seminaries of learning, however, were gi'eatly 
multiplied in this age, and were also elevated in their character, 
in England as well as elsewhere. Both Archbishop Lanfranc 
and his successor Anselm exerted themselves with great zeal in 
establishing proper schools in connexion with the cathedrals and 
monasteries in all parts of the kingdom ; and the object was one 
which was also patronized and promoted by the general voice 
of the Church. In 1179 it was ordered by the third general 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES. ' 35 

council of Lateran, tliat in every catliedral there should be 
appointed and maintained a head teacher, or scholastic, as was 
the title given to him, who, besides keeping a school of his own, 
should have authority over all the other schoolmasters of the 
diocese, and the sole right of granting licences, without which 
no one should be entitled to teach. In former times the bishop 
himself had frequently undertaken the office of scholastic of the 
diocese ; but its duties were rarely efficiently performed under 
that arrangement, and at length they seem to have come to be 
generally altogether neglected. After the custom was intro- 
duced of maintaining it as a distinct office, it was filled in many 
cases by the most learned persons of the time. And besides 
these cathedral schools there were others established in all the 
religious houses, many of which were also of high reputation. 
It is reckoned that of religious houses of all kinds there were 
founded no fewer than five hundred and fiftj^-seven between the 
Conquest and the death of King John ; and, besides these, there 
still existed many others that had been founded in earlier times. 
All these cathedral and conventual schools, however, appear to 
have been intended exclusively for the instruction of persons 
proposing to make the Church their profession. But mention is 
also made of others established both in many of the principal 
cities and even in the villages, which would seem to have been 
open to the community at large ; for it may be presumed that 
the laity, though generally excluded from the benefits of a 
learned education, were not left wholly without the means of 
obtaining some elementary instruction. Some of these city 
schools, however, were eminent as institutes of the highest de- 
partments of learning. One in particular is mentioned in the 
History ascribed to Matthew Paris as established in the town of 
St. Albans, which was presided over by Matthew, a physician, 
who had been educated at the famous school of Salerno, in Italy, 
and by his nephew Garinus, who was eminent for his knowledge 
of the civil and canon laws, and where we may therefore sup- 
pose instructions were given both in law and in medicine. 
According to the account of London b}^ William Stephanides, or 
Fitz-Stephen, written in the reign of Henry II., there were then 
three of these schools of a higher order established in London, 
besides several others that were occasionally opened by distin- 
guished teachers. The London schools, however, do not seem 
to have been academies of science and the higher learning, like 
that of St. Albans : Fitz-Stephen's description would rather lead 
us to infer that, although they were attended by pupils of dif- 
ferent ages' and degrees of proficiency, they were merely schools 



36 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

of grammar, rlietoric, and dialectics. " On holidays," he says, 
"it is usual for these schools to hold public assemblies in the 
churches, in which the scholars engage in demonstrative or 
logical disputations, some using enthymems, and others perfect 
syllogisms ; some aiming at nothing but to gain the victory, and 
make an ostentatious display of their acuteness, while others 
have the investigation of truth in view. Artful sophists on 
these occasions acquire great applause ; some by a prodigious 
inundation and flow of words, others by their specious but fal- 
lacious arguments. After the disputations other scholars deliver 
rhetorical declamations, in which they observe all the rules of 
art, and neglect no topic of persuasion. Even the younger boys 
in the different schools contend against each other, in verse, 
about the principles of grammar, and the preterites and supines 
of verbs." 

The twelfth century may be considered as properly the age of 
the institution of what we now call Universities in Europe, 
though many of the establishments that then assumed the 
regular form of universities had undoubtedly existed long before 
as schools or studia. This was the case with the oldest of the 
European universities, with Bologna and Paris, and also, in all 
probability, with Oxford and Cambridge. But it may be ques- 
tioned if even Bologna, the mother of all the rest, was entitled 
by any organization or constitution it had received to take a 
higher name than a school or studium before the latter pari; of 
this century. It is admitted that it was not till about the year 
1200 that the school out of which the University of Paris arose 
had come to subsist as an incoi-poration, divided into nations, 
and presided over by a rector.* The University of Oxford, 
properly so called, is probably of nearly the same antiquity. It 
seems to have been patronized and fostered by Eichard I., as 
that of Paris was by his great rival, Philip Augustus. Both 
Oxford and Cambridge had undoubtedly been eminent seats of 
learning long before this time, as London, St. Albans, and other 
cities had also been ; but there is no evidence that either the one 
or the other had at an earlier date become anything more than a 
great school, or even that it was distinguished by any assigned 
rank or privileges above the other great schools of the kingdom. 
In the reign of Eichard I. we find the University of Oxford 
recognized as an establishment of the same kind with the 
University ot Paris, and as the lival of that seminary. 

We have the following account of what is commonly deemed 
the origin of the University of Cambridge in the continuation of 
* See Crevier, Hist, de rUniv. de Paris, i. 255. 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES. 37 

the history of Ingulphus, attributed to Peter of Blois, under the 
year 1109 : — " Joffrid, abbot of Croyland, sent to his manor 
of Cottenham, near Cambridge, Master Gislebert, his fellow 
monk, and professor of theology, with three other monks who 
had followed him into England ; who, being very well instrncted 
in philosophical theorems and other primitive sciences, went 
every day to Cambridge, and, having hired a certain public barn, 
taught the sciences openly, and in a little time collected a great 
concourse of scholars ; for, in the very second year after their 
arrival, the number of their scholars from the town and country 
increased so much that there was no house, barn, nor church 
capable of containing them. For this reason they separated into 
different parts of the town, and, imitating the plan of the 
Studium of Orleans, brother Odo, who was eminent as a gram- 
marian and satirical poet, read grammar, according to the 
doctrine of Priscian and of his commentator Eemigius, to the 
boys and younger students, that were assigned to him, early in 
the morning. At one o'clock, brother Terricus, a most acute 
sophist, read the Logic of Aristotle, according to the Intro- 
ductions and Commentaries of Porphyry and Averroes,* to those 
who were further advanced. At three, brother William read 
lectures on Tully's Ehetoric and Quintilian's Institutions. But 
Master Gislebert, being ignorant of the English, but very expert 
in the Latin and French languages, preached in the several 
churches to the people on Sundays and holidays." f The history 
in which this passage occurs is, as will presently be shown, as 
apocryphal as that of which it professes to be the continu;atiori ; 
but even if we waive the question of its authenticity, there is 
here no hint of any sort of incorporation or public establishment 
whatever ; the description is merely that of a school set on foot 
and conducted by an association of private individuals. And 
even this private school would seem to have been first opened 
only in the year 1109, although there may possibly have been 
other schools taught in the place before. It may be gathered 
from what is added, that at the time when the account, if it was 
written by Peter of Blois, must have been drawn up (the latter 
part of the same century), the school founded by Gislebert and 
his companions had attained to great celebrity ; but there is 

* The works of Averroes, however, who died in 1198, were certainly not in 
existence at the time here referred to. Either Peter of Blois must have been 
ignorant of this, or — if he was really the author of the statement — the name 
must have been the insertion of some later transcriber of his text. 

t Petri Blesensis Continuatio ad Historiam Ingulphi : in Rerum Anglicarum 
Script. Vet. : Oxon. ]684, p. 114. The translation is that given by Henry in 
liis History of Britain. 



^8 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. ' ' " 

nothing to lead us to suppose that it had even then become 
more than a very distinguished school. *' From this little 
fountain," he says, " which hath swelled into a great river, we 
now behold the city of God made glad, and all England rendered 
fruitful, by many teachers and doctors issuing from Cambridge, 
after the likeness of the holy Paradise." 

Notwithstanding, however, the rising reputation of Oxford 
and Cambridge, the most ambitious of the English students con- 
tinued to resort for part of their education to the more distin- 
guished foreign schools during the whole of the twelfth century. 
Thus, it is recorded that several volumes of the Arabian phi- 
losophy were brought into England by Daniel Merlac, who, 
in the year 1185, had gone to Toledo to study mathematics. 
Salerno was still the chief school of medicine, and Bologna of 
law, although Oxford was also becoming famous for the latter 
study. But, as a place of general instruction, the University of 
Paris stood at the head of all others. Paris was then wont to be 
styled, by way of pre-eminence, the City of Letters. So many 
Englishmen, or, to speak more strictly, subjects of the English 
crown, were constantly found among the students at this great 
seminary, that they formed one of the four nations into which 
the members of the university were divided. The English 
students are described by their countryman, the poet Nigellus 
Wireker, in the latter part of the twelfth century, in such a 
manner as to show that they were already noted for that spirit 
of display and expense which still makes so prominent a part of 
our continental reputation : — 

Moribus egregii, verbo vultuque venusti, 

Ingenio pollent, consilioque vigent ; 
Dona pkiunt populis, et detestantur avaros, 

Fercula multiplicant, et sine lege bibunt.* 

Of noble manners, gracious look and speech, 
Strong sense, with genius brightened, shines in each. 
Their free hand still rains largess ; when they dine 
Course follows course, in rivers flows the wine. 

Among the students at the University of Paris in the twelfth 
century are to be found nearly all the most distinguished names 
among the learned of every country. One of the teachers, the 
celebrated Abelard, is said to have alone had as pupils twenty 
persons who afterwards became cardinals, and more than fifty 

* These verses are quoted by A, Wood, Antiq. Oxen., p. 55. The poem in 
which they occur is entitled Speculum Stultorum, or sometimes Brunellua (from 
its principal personage). It has been repeatedly printed. 



RISE OF THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY. 39 

who rose to be bishops and archbishops. Thomas a Becket 
received part of his education here. Several of the most 
eminent teachers were Englishmen. Among these may be par- 
ticularl}^ mentioned Eobert of Melun (so called from having 
first taught in that city), and Eobert White, or Pullus, as he is 
called in Latin. Eobert of Melun, who afterwards became 
bishop of Hereford, distinguished himself by the zeal and ability 
with which he opposed the novel views which the rising sect of 
the Nominalists were then introducing both into philosophy and 
theology. He is the author of several theological treatises, none 
of which, however, have been printed. Eobert White, after 
teaching some years at Paris, where he was attended by 
crowded audiences, was induced to return to his own country, 
where he is said to have read lectures on theology at Oxford for 
five years, which greatly contributed to spread the renown of 
that rising seminary. After having declined a bishopric offered 
to him by Henry I., he went to reside at Eome in 1143, on the 
invitation of Celestine II., and was soon after made a cardinal 
and chancellor of the holy see. One work written by him has 
been printed, a summary of theology, under the then common 
title of The Book of Sentences, which has the reputation of 
being distinguished by the superior correctness of its style and 
the lucidness of its method. 

Another celebrated name among the Englishmen who are 
recorded to have studied at Paris in those days is that of Nicolas 
Breakspear, who afterwards became pope by the title of Adrian 
IV. But, above all others, John of Salisbury deserves to be 
here mentioned. It is in his writings that we find the most 
complete account that has reached us not only of the mode of 
study followed at Paris, but of the entire learning of the age. 



EisE OF THE Scholastic Philosophy. 

At this time those branches of literary and scientific know- 
ledge which were specially denominated the arts were considered 
as divided into two great classes, — the first or more elementary 
of which, comprehending Grammar, Ehetoric, and Logic, was 
called the Trivium ; the second, comprehending Music, Arith- 
metic, Geometry, and Astronomy, the Quadrivium. The seven 
arts, so classified, used to be thus enumerated in a Latin hexa- 
meter : — 

Lingua, Tropus, Katio, Numerus, Tonus, Anguliis, Astra ; 



40 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

or, with definitions subjoined, in two still more singularly con- 
structed verses, — 

Gram, loquitur, Dia. vera docet, Bhet. verba colorat, 
Mus, cadit, Ar. nuinerat, Geo. ponderat, Ast. colit astra. 

Jobn of Salisbury speaks of this system of the sciences as an 
ancient one in bis day. " Tbe Trivium and Quadrivium," be 
says, in bis work entitled Metalogicus, " were so much ad- 
mired by our ancestors in former ages, tbat tbey imagined they 
comprebended all wisdom and learning, and were sufficient for 
tbe solution of all questions and tbe removing of all difficulties ; 
for whoever understood tbe Trivium could explain all manner of 
books without a teacher ; but he who was farther advanced, and 
was master also of the Quadrivium, could answer all questions 
and unfold all the secrets of nature." Tbe present age, however, 
had outgrown the simplicity of tbis arrangement ; and various 
new studies had been added to the ancient seven, as necessary to 
complete the circle of the sciences and the curiiculum of a liberal 
education. 

It was now, in particular, tbat Theology first came to be 
ranked as a science. This was tbe age of St. Bernard, the last of 
the Fathers, and of Peter Lombard, the first of the Schoolmen. 
The distinction between these two classes of writers is, that the 
latter do, and the former do not, treat their subject in a system- 
atizing spirit. Tbe change was tbe consequence of the culti- 
vation of the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. AYhen these 
studies were first introduced into the schools of the West, they 
were wboll}^ unconnected with theology. But, especially at a 
time when all the learned were churchmen, it was impossible 
that the great instrument of thought and reasoning could long 
remain unapplied to tbe most important of all the subjects 
of thought — the subject of religion. It has already been re- 
marked tbat John Erigena and other Irish divines introduced 
philosophy and metaphysics into the discussion of questions 
of religion as early as the ninth century ; and they are conse- 
quently entitled to be regarded as having first set the example 
of the method afterwards pursued by the schoolmen. But, 
although tbe influence of their writings may probably be traced 
in preparing the way for the introduction of tbe scholastic 
system, and also, afterwards, perhaps, in modifying its spirit, 
that system was derived immediately, in the shape in which it 
appeared in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, from another 
source. Erigena was a Platonist ; tbe spirit of his philosophy 
was that of tbe school of Alexandria. But the first schoolmen, 



CLASSICAL LEARNING.— MATHEMATICS. 41 

properly so called, were Aristotelians : they drew their logic and 
metaphysics originally from the Latin translations of the works of 
Aristotle made from the Arabic. And they may also have been 
indebted for some of their views to the commentaries of the 
Arabic doctors. But, whether they took their method of phi- 
losophy entirely from the ancient heathen sage, or in part from 
his modern Mahomedan interpreters and illustrators, it could in 
neither case have had at first any necessary or natural alliance 
with Christianity. Yet it very soon, as we have said, formed 
this alliance. Both Lanfranc and Anselm, although not com- 
monly reckoned among the schoolmen, were imbued with the 
spirit of the new learning, and it is infused throughout their 
theological writings. Abelard soon after, before he was yet a 
churchman, may almost be considered to have vs^ielded it as a 
weapon of scepticism. Even so used, however, religion wag 
still the subject to which it was applied. At last came Peter 
Lombard, who, by the publication, about the middle of the twelfth 
century, of his celebrated Four Books of Sentences, properly 
founded the system of what is called the Scholastic Theology. 
The schoolmen, from the Master of the Sentences, as Lombard 
was designated, down to Francis Suarez, who died after the 
commencement of the seventeenth century, were all theologians. 
Although, however, religious speculation was the field of thought 
upon which the spirit of the Aristotelian philosophy chiefly 
expended itself, there was scarcely any one of the arts or 
sciences upon which it did not in some degree seize. The 
scholastic logic became the universal instrument of thought and 
study : every branch of human learning was attempted to be 
pursued by its assistance ; and most branches were more or less 
afiected by ils influence in regard to the forms which they 
assumed. 



Classical Leaenijtg. — Mathematics. — Medicine. — Law. — 
Books. 

The classical knowledge of this period, however, was almost 
confined to the Eoman authors, and some of the most eminent of 
these were as yet unstudied and unknown. Even John of 
Salisbury, though a few Greek words are to be found in his com- 
positions, seems to have had only the slightest possible acquaint- 
ance with that language. Both it and the Hebrew, nevertheless, 
were known to Abelard and Eloisa ; and it is probable that 
there were both in England and other European countries a few 
students of the oriental tongues, for the acquisition of which 



42 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

inducements and facilities must have been presented, not only 
by the custom of resorting to the Arabic colleges in Spain, and 
the constant intercourse with the East kept up by the pil- 
grimages and the crusades, but also by the numbers of learned 
Jews that were everywhere to be found. In England the Jews 
had schools in London, York, Lincoln, Lynn, Norwich, Oxford, 
Cambridge, and other towns, which appear to have been attended 
by Christians as well as by those of their own persuasion. Some 
of these seminaries, indeed, were rather colleges than schools. 
Besides the Hebrew and Arabic languages, arithmetic and me- 
dicine are mentioned among the branches of knowledge that 
were taught in them ; and the masters were generally the most 
distinguished of the rabbis. In the eleventh and twelfth cen- 
turies, the age of Sarchi, the Eamchis, Maimonides, and other 
distinguished names, rabbinical learning was in an eminently 
flourishing state. 

There is no ceii:ain evidence that the Arabic numerals were yet 
known in Europe : they certainly were not in general use. 
Although the Elements of Euclid and other geometrical works 
had been translated into Latin from the Arabic, the mathematical 
sciences appear to have been but little studied. " The science of 
demonstration," says John of Salisbury, in his Metalogicus, 
"is of all others the most difficult, and alas ! is almost quite 
neglected, except by a very few who apply to the study of the 
mathematics, and particularly of geometry. But this last is at 
present very little attended to amongst us, and is only studied 
by some persons in Spain, Egypt, and Arabia, for the sake of 
astronomy. One reason of this is, that those parts of the works 
of Aristotle that relate to the demonstrative sciences are so ill 
translated, and so incorrectly transcribed, that we meet with 
insurmountable difficulties in every chapter." The name of the 
mathematics at this time, indeed, was chiefly given to the science 
of astrology. " Mathematicians," says Peter of Blois, " are those 
who, from the position of the stars, the aspect of the firmament, 
and the motions of the planets, discover things that are to come." 
Astronomy, however, or the true science of the stars, which was 
zealously cultivated by the Arabs in the East and in Spain, 
seems also to have had some cultivators among the learned of 
Christian Europe. Latin translations existed of several Greek 
and Arabic astronomical works. In the History attributed to 
Ingulphus, is the following curious description of a sort of 
scheme or representation of the planetary system called the 
Nadir, which is stated to have been destroyed when the abbey of 
Croyland was burnt in 1091 : " We then lost a most beautiful and 



MEDICINE AND LAW. 43 

precious table, fabricated of different kinds of metals, according to 
the variety of the stars and heavenly signs. Saturn was of copper, 
Jupiter of gold, Mars of iron, the Sun of latten. Mercury of amber, 
Venus of tin, the Moon of silver. The eyes were charmed, as 
well as the mind instructed, by beholding the colure circles, with 
the zodiac and all its signs, formed with wonderful art, of metals 
and precious stones, according to their several natures, forms, 
figures, and colours. It was the most admired and celebrated 
Nadir in all England." These last words would seem to imply 
that such tables were then not uncommon. This one, it is stated, 
had been presented to a former abbot of Croyland by a king of 
France. 

John of Salisbury, in his account of his studies at Paris, makes 
no mention either of medicine or of law. With regard to the 
former, indeed, he elsewhere expressly tells us that the Parisians 
themselves used to go to study it at Salerno and Montpellier. 
By the beginning of the thirteenth century, however, we find a 
school of medicine established at Paris, which soon became very 
celebrated. Of course there were, at an earlier date, persons who 
practised the medical art in that city. The physicians in all the 
countries of Europe at this period were generally churchmen. 
Many of the Arabic medical works were early translated into 
Latin ; but the Parisian professors soon began to publish treatises 
on the art of their own. The science of the physicians of this 
age, besides comprehending whatever was to be learned respect- 
ing the diagnostics and treatment of diseases from Hippocrates, 
Galen, and the other ancient writers, embraced a considerable 
body of botanical and chemical knowledge. Chemistry in par- 
ticular the Arabs had carried far beyond the point at which it 
had been left by the ancients. Of anatomy little could as yet be 
accurately known, while the dissection of the human subject was 
not practised. Yet it would appear that physicians and surgeons 
were already beginning to be distinguished from each other. 
Both the canon and civil laws were also introduced into the 
routine of study at the University of Paris soon after the time 
when John of Salisbury studied there. The canon law was 
originally considered to be a part of theology, and only took the 
form of a separate study after the publication of the systematic 
compilation of it called the Decretum of Gratian, in 1151. 
Gratian was a monk of Bologna, and his work, not the first 
collection of the kind, but the most complete and the best- 
arranged that had yet been compiled, was immediately introduced 
as a text-book in that imiversity. It may be regarded as having 
laid the foundation of the science of the canon law, in the same 



44 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

manner as the system of the scholastic philosophy was founded by 
Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences. Eegular lecturers upon it 
very soon appeared at Orleans, at Paris, at Oxford, and all the 
other chief seats of learning in western Christendom ; and before 
the end of the twelfth century no other study was more eagerly 
pursued, or attracted greater crowds of students, than that of the 
canon law. One of its first and most celebrated teachers 'at 
Paris was Girard la Pucelle, an Englishman, who afterwards 
became bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. Girard taught the 
canon law in Paris from 1160 to 1177 ; and, in consideratioQ of 
his distinguished merits and what was deemed the great im- 
portance of his instructions, he received from Pope Alexander III. i 
letters exempting him from the obligation of residing on his : 
preferments in England while he was so engaged ; this being, it ! 
is said, the first known example of such a privilege being ' 
granted to any professor.* The same professors who taught the 
canon law taught also, along with it, the civil law, the syste- i 
matic stud}^ of which, Hkewise, took its rise in this century, and i 
at the University of Bologna, where the Pandects of Justinian, of 
which a more perfect copy than had before been known is said 
to have been found in 1137 at Amalfi,| were arranged and first j 
lectured upon by the German Irnerius, — the Lamp of the Law, ! 
as he was called, — about the year 1150. Both the canon and 
the civil law, however, are said to have been taught a few years 
before this time at Oxford by Eoger, surnamed the Bachelor, a 
monk of Bee, in Normandy. The study was, from the first, 
vehemently opposed by the practitioners of the common law; 
but, sustained by the influence of the Church, and eventually also 
favoured by the government, it rose above all attempts to put it 
down. John of Salisbury affirms that, by the blessing of God, 
the more it was persecuted the more it flourished. Peter of 
Blois, in one of his letters, gives us the following curious account 
of the ardour with which it was pursued under the superintend- 
ence of Archbishop Theobald : — " In the house of my master, 
the Archbishop of Canterbury, there are several very learned 
men, famous for their knowledge of law and politics, who spend 
the time between prayers and dinner in lecturing, disputing, 
and debating causes. To us all the knotty questions of the 

* Crevier, Hist, de I'lJiiiv. de Paris, i. 244. 

t " The discovery of the Pandects at Amalfi," says Gibbon, " is first noticed 
(in 1501) by Ludovicus Bologninus, on the faith of a Pisan Chronicle, without 
a name or date. The whole story, though unknown to the twelfth century, 
embellished by ignorant ages, and suspected by rigid criticism, is not however 
destitute of much internal probability." 



BOOKS. 45 

kingdom are referred, which are produced in the common hall, 
and every one in his order, having first prepared himself, de- 
clares, with all the eloquence and acuteness of which he is 
capable, but without wrangling, what is wisest and safest to be 
done. If God suggests the soundest opinion to the 3-oungest 
amongst us, we all agree to it without envy or detraction."* 

Study in every department must have been still greatly im- 
peded by the scarcity and high price of books ; but their multi- 
plication now went on much more rapidly than it had formerly 
done. We have already noticed the immense libraries said to 
have been accumulated by the Arabs, both in their oriental and 
European seats of empire. No collections to be compared with 
these existed anywhere in Christian Europe ; but, of the numerous 
monasteries that were planted in every country, few were with- 
out libraries of greater or less extent. A convent without a 
library, it used to be proverbially said, was like a castle without 
an armoury. When the monastery of Croyland was burnt in 
1091, its librar}^, according to Ingulphus, consisted of 900 
volumes, of which 300 were very large. " In every great 
abbey," says Warton, " there was an apartment called the Scrip- 
torium; where many writers were constantly busied in tran- 
scribing not only the service-books for the choir, but books for 
the library. The Scriptorium of St. Albans abbey was built by 
Abbot Paulin, a Norman, who ordered many volumes to be 
written there, about the year 1080. Archbishop Lanfranc fur- 
nished the copies. Estates were often granted for the support 
of the Scriptorium. ... I find some of the classics written in the 
English monasteries very early. Henry, a Benedictine monk of 
Hyde Abbey, near Winchester, transcribed in the year 1178 
Terence, Boethius, Suetonius, and Claudian. Of these he formed 
one book, illuminating the initials, and forming the brazen 
bosses of the covers with his own hands." Other instances of 
the same kind are added. The monks were much accustomed 
both to illuminate and to bind books, as well as to transcribe 
them. " Tho scarcity of parchment," it is afterwards observed, 
" undoubtedly prevented the transcription of many other books 
in these societies. About the year 1120, one Master Hugh, 
being appointed by the convent of St. Edmondsbury, in Suffolk, 
to write and illuminate a grand copy of the Bible for their 
library, could procure no parchment for this purpose in Eng- 
land." I Paper made of cotton, however, was certainly in com- 
mon use in the twelfth century, though no evidence exists that 

* Ep. vi., as translated in Henry's History of Britain, 
t Introd. of Learning into England, p. cxvi. 



46 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tliat manufactured from 
middle of the thirteentli. 



1 



tliat manufactured from linen rags was known till about the 



The Latii^ Language. 

During the whole of the Anglo-Norman period, and down to a 
much later date, in England as in the other countries of Christen- 
dom, the common language of literary composition, in all works 
intended for the perusal of the educated classes, was still the 
Latin, the language of religion throughout the western world, as 
it had been from the first ages of the Church. Christianity had 
not only, through its monastic institutions, saved from destruc- 
tion, in the breaking up of the Eoman empire, whatever we 
still possess of ancient literature, but had also, by its priesthood 
and its ritual, preserved the language of Eome in some sort still 
a living and spoken tongue — corrupted indeed by the introduc- 
tion of many new and barbarous terms, and illegitimate accepta- 
tions, and by much bad taste in style and phraseology, but still 
wholly unchanged in its grammatical forms, and even in its 
vocabulary much less altered than it probably would have been 
if it had continued all the while to be spoken and written by an 
unmixed Eoman population. It would almost seem as if, even 
in the Teutonic countries, such as England, the services of the 
church, uninterruptedly repeated in the same words since the 
first ages, had kept up in the general mind something of a dim 
traditionary understanding of the old imperial tongue. We read 
of some foreign ecclesiastics, who could not speak English, being 
accustomed to preach to the people in Latin. A passage quoted 
above from the Croyland History seems to imply that Gislebert, 
or Gilbert, one of the founders of the University of Cambridge, 
used to employ Latin as well as French on such occasions. So, 
Giraldus Cambrensis tells us that, in a progress which he made 
through Wales in 1186, to assist Archbishop Baldwin in preach- 
ing a new crusade for the delivery of the Holy Land, he was 
always most successful when he appealed to the people in a 
Latin seiTiion ; he asserts, indeed, that they did not understand a 
word of it, although it never failed to melt them into tears, and 
to make them come in crowds to take the cross. No doubt they 
were acted upon chiefly through their ears and their imaginations, 
and for the most part only supposed that they com]Drehended 
what they were listening to ; but it is probable that their self- 
deception was assisted by their catching a word or phrase here 
and there the meaning of which they really understood. The 
Latin tongue must in those days have been heard in common life 



LATm CHRONICLERS. 47 

on a thousand occasions from which it has now passed away. It 
was the language of all the learned professions, of law and physic 
as well as of divinity, in all their grades. It was in Latin that 
the teachers at the Universities (many of whom, as well as of the 
ecclesiastics, were foreigners) delivered their prelections in all 
the sciences, and that all the disputations and other exercises 
among the students were carried on. It was the same at all the 
monastic schools and other seminaries of learning. The number 
of persons by whom these various institutions were attended was 
very great : they were of all ages from boyhood to advanced 
manhood; and poor scholars must have been found in every 
village, mingling with every class of the people, in some one or 
other of the avocations which they followed in the intervals of 
their attendance at the Universities, or after they had finished 
their education, from parish priests down to wandering beggars. 



Latin Chroniclers. 

By far the most valuable portion of our Latin literature of 
this age consists of the numerous historical works which it has 
bequeathed to us. These works have a double interest for the 
English reader, belonging to the country and the age in which 
they were written by their subject as well as by their authorship. 
All that we can do here, however, is to enumerate the principal 
collections that have been made in modern times of our old Latin 
historians or chroniclers : — 

1. Rerum Britannicarum, id est, Angliae, Scotise, Yicinarumque 
Insularum ac Regionum, Scriptores Vetustiores ac Prsecipui : (a 
HiER. CoMMELiNo). Fol. Hcidelb. & Lugd. 1587. 

2. Rerum Anglicarum Scriptores post Bedam Prsecipui, ex 
Vetustissimis MSS. nunc primum in lucem editi : (a Hen. Savile). 
FoL Lon. 1596, and Francof. 1601. 

3. Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, a veteribus 
Scripta, ex Bibl. Guilielmi Camdeni. Fol. Francof. 1602 and 
1603. 

4. Historiae Normannorum Scriptores Antiqui ; studio Andrew 
Duchesne. Fol. Paris. 1619. 

5. Historiae Anglicanee Scriptores Decern, ex vetustis MSS. 
nunc primum in lucem editi : (a Rog. Twysden et Joan. Selden). 
Fol. Lon. 1652. 

6. Rerum Anglicarum Scriptorum Yeterum Tomus I™"«; 
Quorum Ingulfus nunc primum integer, ceteri nunc primum, 
prodeunt: (a Joan. Fell, vel potius Gul. Fulman). FoL Oxon. 



48 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

1684. (Sometimes incorrectly cited as the 1st vol. of Gale's 
Collection.) 

7. Ilistoriae Anglicange Scriptores Quinqne, ex vetustis Codd. 
MSS. nunc primum in lucem editi : (a Thom. Gale). Fol. Oxon. 
1687. (This is properly the 2nd vol. of Gale's Collection.) 

8. Historise Britannicag, Saxonicsa, Anglo-Danicse, Scriptores 
Quindecim, ex vetustis Codd. MSS. editi, opera Thom.e Gale. 
Fol. Oxon. 1691. (This is properly the 1st vol. of Gale's Col- 
lection, though often cited as the 3rd.) 

9. Anglia Sacra; sive Collectio Historiarum . . . de Archie- 
piscopis et Episcopis Anglise ; (a Henrico Wharton) . 2 Tom. 
Fol. Lon. 1691. 

10. Ilistoriae Anglicanse Scriptores Yarii, e Codd. MSS. nunc 
primum editi : (a Jos. Sparke). Fol. Lon. 1723. 

11. Historise Anglicanse circa tempus Conquestus Angliae a 
Guilielmo Notho, Normannorum Duce, selecta Monumenta ; 
excerpta ex volumine And. Duchesne ; cum Notis, &c. : (a 
Francisco Maseres). 4to. Lon. 1807. 

12. Monumenta Historica Britannica; or, Materials for the 
History of Britain from the earliest period to the end of the reign 
of King Henry VII. Published by command of her Majesty. 
Vol. 1st (extending to the Korman Conquest). Fol. Lon. 1848. 
(By Petrie, Sharpe, and Hardy.) 

To which may be added : — 

13. The series of works printed by the Historical Society, 
from 1838 to 1856, extending to 29 vols. 8vo. ; and, 

14. The series entitled Eerum Britannicarum Medii ^vi 
Scriptores, or Chronicles and Memorials of Great Biitain and 
Ireland during the Middle Ages. Published by authority of 
her Majesty's Treasmy, under the direction of the Master of 
the Eolls. 8vo. Lon. 1857, &c. 



The French Language in England. 

It is commonly asserted that for some reigns after the Norman 
Conquest the exclusive language of government and legislation 
in England was the French, — that all pleadings, at least in the 
supreme courts, were carried on in that language, — and that in 
it all deeds were drawn up and all laws promulgated. " This 
popular notion," observes a learned living writer, " cannot be 
easily supported. . . . Before the reign of Henry III. we cannot 
discover a deed or law drawn or composed in French. Instead 
of prohibiting the English language, it was employed by the 
Conqueror and his successors in their charters until the reign 



THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN ENGLAND. ■ 49 

of Henry II., when it was superseded, not by the French but 
by the Latin language, which had been gradually gaining, or 
rather regaining, ground ; for the charters anterior to Alfred are 
invariably in Latin."* So far was the Conqueror from showing 
any aversion to the English language, or making any such 
attempt as is ascribed to him to effect its abolition, that, accord- 
ing to Ordericus Yitalis, when he first came over he strenuously 
applied himself to learn it for the special purpose of under- 
standing, without the aid of an interpreter, the causes that were 
pleaded before him, and persevered in that endeavour till the 
tumult of many other occupations, and what the historian calls 
" durior aetas "—a more iron time f — of necessity compelled him 
to give it up, J The common statement rests on the more than 
suspicious authority of the History attributed to Ingulphus, the 
fabricator of which, in his loose and ignorant account of the 
matter, has set down this falsehood along with some other things 
that are true or probable. Even before the Conquest, the Con- 
fessor himself, according to this writer, though a native of 
England, yet, from his education and long residence in Nor- 
mandy, had become almost a Frenchman ; and when he suc- 
ceeded to the English throne he brought over with him great 
numbers of Normans, whom he advanced to the highest dignities 
in the church and the state. "Wherefore," it is added, "the 
whole land began, under the influence of the king and the other 
Normans introduced by him, to lay aside the English customs, 
and to imitate the manners of the French in many things ; for 
example, all the nobility in their courts began to speak French 
as a great piece of gentility, to draw up their charters and other 
writings after the French fashion, and to grow ashamed of their 
old national habits in these and many other particulars. "§ 
Further on we are told, " They [the Normans] held the language 
[of the natives] in such abhorrence that the laws of the land and 
the statutes of the English kings were drawn out in the Gallic 
[or French] tongue ; and to boys in the schools the elements of 
grammar were taught in French and not in English ; even the 
English manner of writing was dropped, and the French manner 
introduced in all charters and books. "|| The facts are more 
correctly given by other old writers, who, although not con- 

* Sir Francis Palgrave, Else and Progress of the English Commonwealth, 
voL i. p. 56. 

t Quid nos dura refugimus aetas? — Hor. Od. i. 35. 

;|: Excerpta ex Libro iv. Orderici Vitalis, p, 247 ; edit. Maseres. 

§ Ingulphi Historia, in Savile, 895 ; or in Fulman, 62. The translation, 
which is sufficiently faithful, is Henry's. 

II Id. Savile, 901 ; Fulman, 71. 

E 



50 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

temporary witli the Conquest, are probably of as early a date as- 
the compiler of the Croyland History. The Dominican friar 
Eobert Holcot, writing in the earlier part of the fourteenth cen- 
tury, informs us that there was then no institution of children in 
the old English — that the first language they learned was the 
Erench, and that through that tongue they were afterwards 
taught Latin ; and he adds that this was a practice which had 
been introduced at the Conquest, and which had continued ever 
since.* About the middle of the same century Eanulf Higden, 
in his Polychronicon, says, as the passage is translated by 
Trevisa, " This apayringe (impairing) of the birthe tonge is by 
cause of tweye thinges ; oon is for children in scole, aghenes 
(against) the usage and maner of alle other naciouns, beth (be) 
compelled for to leve her (their) owne langage, and for to con- 
strewe her lessouns and her thingis a Frensche, and haveth siththe 
(have since) that the Normans come first into England. Also 
gentil mennes children beth y taught (be taught) for to speke 
Frensche from the time that thei beth rokked in her cradel, and 
eunneth (can) speke and playe with a childes brooche ; and 
Tiplondish (rustic) men wol likne hem self (will liken them- 
selves) to gentilmen, and fondeth (are fond) with grete bisy-> 
nesse for to speke Frensche, for to be the more ytold of.""!" 
The teachers in the schools, in fact, were generally, if not uni- 
versally, ecclesiastics ; and the Conquest had Normanized the 
church quite as much as the state. Immediately after that 
revolution great numbers of foreigners were brought over, both 
to serve in the parochial cures and to fill the monasteries that 
now began to multiply'" so rapidly. These churchmen must have 
been in constant intercourse with the people of all classes in 
various capacities, not only as teachers of youth, but as the 
instructors of their parishioners from the altar, and as holding 
daily and hourly intercourse with them in all the relations that 
subsist between pastor and flock. They probably in this way 
dififused their own tongue throughout the land of their adoption 
to a greater extent than is commonly suspected. We shall have 
occasion, as we proceed, to mention some facts which would 
seem to imjDly that in the twelfth century the French language 
was very generally familiar to the middle classes in England, at 
least in the great towns. It was at any rate the only language 
spoken for some ages after the Conquest by our kings, and not ! 

* Lect. ill Libr. Sapient. Lect. ii., 4to. Paris, 1518 ; as referred t<» by 
Warton, Hist. Eng, Poetry, i. 5. 

t Quoted from MS.Harl. 1900, by TyrwLitt, in Essay on the Language and 
Versification of Cliaucer, prefixed to his edition of the Canterbury Tales. 



THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN ENGLAND. 51 

only by nearly all the nobility, but by a large proportion even 
of the inferior landed proprietors, most of whom also were of 
Norman birth or descent. Eitson, in his rambling, incoherent 
Dissertation on Eomance and Minstrelsy, prefixed to his 
Ancient English Metrical Romances, has collected, but not in 
the most satisfactory manner, some of the evidence we have 
as to the speech of the first Norman kings. He does not 
notice what Ordericus Yitalis tells ns of the Conqueror's meri- 
torious attempt, which does not seem, however, to have been 
more successful than such experiments on the part of grown-up 
gentlemen usually are ; so that he may be allowed to be correct 
enough in the assertion with which he sets out, that we have no 
information " that William the Bastard, his son Rufus, his 
daughter Maud, or his nephew Stephen, did or could speak the 
Anglo-Saxon or English language." Eeference is then made to 
a story told in what is called Bromton's Chronicle respecting 
Henry II., which, however, is not very intelligible in all its 
parts, though Eitson has slurred over the difficulties. As 
Henry was passing through Wales, the old chronicler relates, 
on his return from Ireland in the spring of 1172, he found him- 
self on a Sunday at the castle of Cardiff, and stopped there to 
hear mass ; after which, as he was proceeding to mount his 
horse to be off again, there presented itself before him a some- 
what singular apparition, a man with red hair and a round 
tonsure,* lean and tall, attired in a white tunic and barefoot, 
who, addressing him in the Teutonic tongue, began, " Gode 
Olde Kinge,"! and proceeded to deliver a command from Christ, 
as he said, and his mother, from John the Baptist and Peter, 
that he should suffer no traffic or servile works to be done 
throughout his dominions on the sabbath-day, except only such 
as pertained to the use of food ; " which command, if thou 
observest," concluded the speaker, " whatever thou mayest 
undertake thou shalt happily accomplish." The king immedi- 
ately, speaking in French, desired the soldier who held the 
bridle of his horse to ask the rustic if he had dreamed all this. 
The soldier made the inquiry, as desired, in English ; and then, 
it is added, the man replied in the same language as before, and 
addressing the king said, " Whether I have dreamed it or no, 

* Tonsura rotunda. Scriptores Decern, 1079. The epithet would seem to 
imply that there were still in Wales some priests of the ancient British 
Church who retained the old national crescent-shaped tonsure, now deemed 
heretical. 

t Henry and his son of the same name were commonly distinguished as the 
^ Old and the Young King from the date of the coronation of the latter (whom 
bis fatiier survived) in 1170. 



52 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

mark this day ; for, unless tliou slialt do wlaat I have told thee, 
and amend thy life, thou shalt within a year's time hear such 
news as thou shalt mourn to the dat^j of thy death." And, having 
so spoken, the man vanished out of sight. With the calamities 
which of course ensued to the doomed king we have here nothing 
to do. Although the chronicler reports only the three com- 
mencing words of the prophet's first address in what he calls the 
Teutonic tongue, there can be no doubt, we conceive, that the 
rest, though here translated into Latin, was also delivered in the 
same Teutonic (by which, apparently, can only have been meant 
the vernacular English, or what is commonly called Saxon). The 
man would not begin his speech in one language, and then sud- 
denly break away into another. But, if this waKS the case, 
HenTj, from his reply, w^ould appear to have understood English, 
though he might not be able to speak it. The two languages, 
thus subsisting together, were probably both understood by 
many of those who could only speak one of them. We have 
another evidence of this in the fact of the soldier, as we have 
seen, speaking English and also understanding the kings Erench. 
It is, we suppose, merely so much affectation or bad rhetoric in 
the chronicler that makes him vary his phrase for the same 
thing from " the Teutonic tongue " (Teutonica lingua) in one place 
to " English" (Avglice) in another, and immediately after to 
"the former language" Qingua priori) ; for the words which he 
gives as Teutonic are English words, and, when Henry desired 
the soldier to address the priest in English and the soldier did 
so, it must have been because that was the language in which he 
had addressed the king.* 

"King Eichard," Eitson proceeds, "is never known to have 
uttered a single English word, unless one may rely on the 
evidence of Eobeii: Mannyng for the express words, when, of 
Isaac King of Cyprus, '0 dele,' said the king, 'this is a.fole 
Breton.' The latter expression seems proverbial, whether it 
alludes to the Welsh or to the Armoricans, because Isaac was 
neither by birth, though he might be both by folly. Many great 
nobles of England, in this century, were utterly ignorant of the 
English language." As an instance, he mentions the case, before 
noticed by Tyrwhitt, of William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, 

* A somewliat different view of this story is taken by Mr, Luders in his 
tract On the Use of the French Language in our ancient Laws and Acts of 
State. (Tracts on Various Subjects, p. 400.) He remarks : " The author does 
not tell why the ghost spoke German to tiie king in Wales, or how this 
German became all at once good English ; nor how it happened that the 
groom addressed the German ghost in English." Mr. Luders, therefore, lui- 
derstands "the Teutonic tongue" to mean, not English^ but German. 



THE LANGUE D'OC AND THE LANGUE D'OYL. 53 

chancellor and prim-e minister to Ei chard I., who, according to a 
remarkable account in a letter of his contemporary Hugh bishop 
of Coventiy, preserved by Hoveden, did not know a word of 
English.* The only fact relating to this subject in connexion 
with John or his reign that Eitson brings forward, is the speech 
which that king's ambassador, as related by Matthew Paris, made 
to the King of Morocco : — " Our nation is learned in three idioms, 
that is to say, Latin, French, and English." | This w^ould go to 
support the conclusion that both the French and the Latin 
languages were at this time not unusually spoken by persons of 
education in England. 



The Langue d'Oc and the Langue d'Oyl. 

French as well as Latin was at least extensively employed 
among us in literary composition. The Gauls, the original 
inhabitants of the country now called France, were a Celtic 
people, and their speech was a dialect of the same great 
primitive tongue which probably at one time prevailed over 
the whole of AVestern Europe, and is still vernacular in 
Ireland, in Wales, and among the Highlanders of Scotland. 
After the country became a Eoman province this ancient 
language gradually gave place to the Latin ; which, how- 
ever, here as elsewhere, soon became corrupted in the mouths 
of a population mixing it with their own barbarous vocables 
and forms, or at least divesting it of many of its proper charac- 
teristics in their iiide appropriation of it. But, as different 
depraving or obliterating influences operated in different cir- 
cumstances, and a variety of kinds of bad Latin were thus 
produced in the several countries which had been provinces of 
the empire, so even within the limits of Gaul there grew up 
two such distinct dialects, one in the south, another in the north. 
All these forms of bastard Latin, wherever they arose, whether 

* Linguam Anglicanam prorsns ignorabat. — Hoveden, 704. Ritson, omitting 
all mention either of Hoveden or Tyrwliitt, chooses to make a general refer- 
ence to the chronicle called Bromton's, a later compilation, the author of 
which (vide col. 1227) has quietly appropriated Bishop Hugh's Letter, and 
made it part of his narrative, 

t Tliis was a secret mission despatched by John, the historian tells us, in 
1213, " ad Admiralium Mm-melium, regem magnum Aphricse., Marrochife, et 
Hispaniae, quem vidgus Miramumelinum vocat." The words used by Thomas 
Herdington, the one of the tliree commissioners selected, on account of his 
superior gift of eloquence, to be spokesman, were " Gens nostra speciosa et 
ingeniosa tribus pollet idiomatibus erudita, scihcet Latino, Gallico, et An- 
glico."— Matt. Paris, 243. 



54 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

in Italy, in Spain, or in Gaul, were known by the common name 
of Eoman, or Eomance, languages, or the Enstic Eoman (Eomana 
Enstica), and were by that generic term distinguished from the 
barbarian tongnes, or thoFe that had been spoken by the Celtic, 
German, and other nnciTilized nations before they came into 
communication with the Eomans. From them have sprung 
what are called the Latin languages of modern Europe — the 
Italian, the Spanish, and the Portuguese, as well as what we now 
denominate the French. The Eomance spoken in the south of 
Gaul appears to have been originally nearly, if not altogether, 
identical with that spoken in the north-east of Spain ; and it 
always preserved a close resemblance and affinity to that and the 
other Eomance dialects of Spain and Italy. It is in fact to be 
accounted a nearer relation of the Spanish and Italian than of 
the modern French. The latter is exclusively the offspring of 
the Eomance of northern Gaul, which, both during its first 
growth and subsequently, was acted upon by different influences 
from those w^hich modified the formation of the southern tongue. 
It is probable that whatever it retained of the Celtic ingredient 
to begin with was, if not stronger or of larger quantity than 
what entered into the Eomance dialect of the south, at any rate 
of a somewhat different character ; but the peculiar form it 
eventually assumed may be regarded as having been mainly 
owing to the foreign pressure to which it was twice afterwards 
exposed, first by the settlement of the Franks in the north and 
north-east of Gaul in the fifth century (while the Visigoths and 
Burgundians had spread themselves over the south), and again 
bj^ that of the Normans in the north-west in the tenth. ^^ hat 
may have been the precise nature or amount of the effect pro- 
duced upon the Eomance tongue of Northern Gaul by either or 
both of these Teutonic occupations of the country, it is not 
necessary for our present purpose to inquire ; it is sufficient to 
observe that that dialect could not fail to be thereby peculiarly 
affected, and its natural divergence from the southern Eomance 
materiall}^ aided and promoted. The result, in fact, was that 
the two dialects became two distinct languages, differing from 
one another more than any two other of the Latin languages did 
— the Italian, for example, from the Spanish, or the Spanish 
from the Portuguese, and even more than the Eomance of the 
south of Gaul differed from that either of Italy or of Spain. 
This southern Eomance, it only remains further to be observed, 
came in course of time to be called the Provenpal tongue ; but 
it does not appear to have received this name till, in the begin- 
ning of the twelfth century, the county of Provence had fallen 



THE LANGUE D'OC AND THE LANGUE D'OYL. 55 

to be inherited by Eaymond Berenger, Count of Catalonia, who 
thereupon transferred his court to Aries, and made that town the 
centre and chief seat of the literary cultivation which had 
previously flourished at Barcelona. There had been poetry 
written in the Eomance of Southern Gaul before this ; but it 
was not till now that the Troubadours, as the authors of that 
poetry called themselves, rose into much celebrity ; and hence it 
has been maintained, with great appearance of reason, that what 
is best or most characteristic about the Provenyal poetry is really 
not of French but of Spanish origin. In that case the first 
inspiration may probably have been caught from the Arabs. 
The greater part of Provence soon after passed into the possession 
of the Counts of Toulouse, and the Troubadours flocked to that 
city. But the glory of the Provengal tongue did not last alto- 
gether for much more than a century ; and then, when it had 
ceased to be emploj^ed in poetry and literature, and had declined 
into a mere provincial patois, it and the northern French 
were wont to be severally distinguished by the names of 
the Langue d'Oc (sometimes called by modern writers the 
Occitanian) and the Langue d'Oyl, from the words for yes, which 
were og in the one, and oyl, afterwards oy or oz«', in the other. 
Dante mentions them by these appellations, and with this 
explanation, in his treatise De Vulgari Eloquio, written in the end 
of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century ; and one 
of them still gives its name to the great province of Languedoc, 
where the dialect formerly so called yet subsists as the popular 
speech, though, of course, much changed and debased from what 
it was in the days of its old renown, when it lived on the lips of 
rank and genius and beauty, and was the favourite vehicle of love 
and song. 

The Langue d'Oyl, on the other hand, formerly spoken only to 
the north of the Loire, has grown u.p into what we now call the 
French language, and has become, at least for literary purposes, 
and for all the educated classes, the established language of the 
whole country. Some fond students of the remains of the other 
dialect have deplored this result as a misfortune to France, which 
the}^ contend would have had a better modern language and lite- 
rature if the Langue d'Oc, in the contest between the two, had 
prevailed over the Langue d'Oyl. It is probable, indeed, that 
accident and political circumstances have had more to do in 
determining the matter as it has gone than the merits of the 
case ; but in every country as well as in France — in Spain, in 
Italy, in Germany, in England — some other of the old popular 
dialects than the one that has actually acquired the ascendancy 



56 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

has in like manner had its enthusiastic reclaimers against the 
unjust fortune which has condemned it to degradation or 
oblivion ; and we may suspect that the j)artiality which the 
mind is apt to acquire for whatever it has made the subject of 
long investigation and study, especially if it be something which 
has been generally neglected, and perhaps in some instances a 
morbid sympathy with depression and defeat, which certain 
historical and philosophical speculators have in common with 
the readers and T%T:iters of sentimental novels, are at the bottom 
of much of this unavailing and purposeless lamentation. The 
question is one which we have hardly the means of solving, even 
if any solution of it which might now be attainable could have 
any practical eifect. The Langue d'Oyl is now unalterably esta- 
blished as the French language ; the Langue d'Oc is, except as a 
local patois, irrecoverably dead. Xor are there wanting French 
archaeologists, quite equal in knowledge of the subject to their 
opponents, who maintain that in this there is nothing to regret, 
but the contrary — that the northern Eomance tongue was as 
superior to the southern intrinsically as it has proved iu fortune, 
and that its early literature was of far higher value and promise 
than the Provencal.* 

Yernacular Language and Literature: — a.d. 1066 — 1216. 

From the Noiinan Conquest to the termination of the reign of 
the seventh Norman sovereign. King John, is almost exactly a 
century and a half, even to a day. The victory of Hastings was 
gained on the 14th of October, 1066, and John died on the 19th 
of October, 1216. His death, happening at the time it did, was 
probably an event of the greatest importance. The political con- 
stitution, or system of government, established by the Conquest, 
— a system of pure monarchy or absolutism — had been formally 
brought to an end the year before by the grant of the Great 
Charter wrung from the crown by the baronage, which at any 
rate tempered the monarchical despotism by the introduction of 
the aristocratic element into the theory of the constitution ; but 

* What has come to be called the French tongue, it may he proper to 
notice, has no relationship whatever to that of the proper French, or Franks, 
who were a Tentonic people, speaking a purely Teutonic langua.s:e, resembling 
the German, or more nearly the Flemish. This old Teutonic French, which 
the Franks continued to speak for several centuries after their conquest of 
Gaul, is denominated by philologists the Frankisli, or Francic. The modem 
French, which is a Latin tongue, has come to be so called from the accident 
of the country in which it was spoken having been conquered by the French 
or Franks — the conquerors, as in other cases, in course of time adopting the 
language of the conquered, and bestowing upon it their own name. 



VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 57 

this might have proved little more than a theoretical or nominal 
innovation if John had lived. His death, and the non-age of 
his son and heir, left the actual management of affairs in the 
hands of those by whom the constitutional reform had been 
brought about ; and that reform became a practical reality. At 
the least, its legal character and authority never were disputed ; 
no attempt ever was made to repeal it ; on the contrary it was 
ratified no less than six times in the single reign of Henry III., 
John's successor ; and it has retained its proper place at the 
head of the Statute Book down to our own day. Its proper 
place ; for it is indeed our first organic law, the true commencement 
or foundation-stone, of the constitution. Before it there was no 
mechanism in our political system, no balance of forces or play of 
counteracting elements and tendencies ; nothing but the sort of 
life and movement that may belong to a stone or a cannon-ball 
or any other mere mass. The royal power was all in all. "With 
the Charter, and the death of the last despotic king, from whom 
it was extorted, begins another order of things both political and 
social. It may be likened to the passing away of the night and 
the dawning of a new day. In particular, the Charter may be 
said to have consummated by a solemn legislative fiat the blend- 
ing and incorporation of the two races, the conquerors and the 
conquered, which had been actively going on without any such 
sanction, and under the natural influence of circumstances only, 
throughout the preceding half-century, — having commenced, 
we may reckon, perhaps, half a century earlier, or about the 
middle of the reign of Henry I. There is, at least, not a word 
in this law making the least reference to any distinction between 
the two races. Both are spoken of throughout only as English ; 
the nation is again recognized as one, as fully as it had been 
before either William the Norman or Canute the Dane. 

We have thus four successive periods of about half a century 
each: — The first, from the Danish to the Norman Conquest, — 
half English, half Danish ; the Second, from the Norman Con- 
quest to the middle of the reign of Henry T., in which the sub- 
jugated English and their French or Norman rulers were com- 
pletely divided ; the Third and Fourth extending to the date of 
Magna Charta, and presenting, the former the comparatively 
slow, the latter the accelerated, process of the intermixture and 
fusion of the two races. Some of our old chroniclers would 
make the third half-century also, as well as the first and second, 
to have been inaugurated by a great constitutional or political 
event: as the year 1016 is memorable for the Danish and the 
year 1066 for the Norman Conquest, so in 1116, we are told by 



58 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Stow, " on the 19tli day of April, King Henry called a council 
of all tlie States of his realm, both of the Prelates, Nobles, and 
Commons, to Salisbury, there to consult for th« good government 
of the Commonwealth, and the weighty affairs of the same, which 
council, taking the name and fame of the French, is called a Par- 
liament ;" " and this," he adds, " do the historiographers note to 
be the first Parliament in England, and that the kings before 
that time were never wont to call any of their Commons or 
people to council or lawmaking." This theory of the origin of 
our parliamentary government must, indeed, be rejected ;* but 
the year 1116 will still remain notable as that in which Henry, 
reversing what had been done fifty years before, crossed the sea 
with an army of English to reduce his ancestral Normandy, or 
prevent it from falling into the hands of the son of his unfortu- 
nate elder brother. Even the next stage, half a century further 
on, when we have supposed the amalgamation of the two races to 
have assumed its accelerated movement, may be held to be less 
precisely indicated by such events as the appointment of Becket, 
said to be the first Englishman since the Conquest promoted to 
high office either in the Church or the State, to the archbishopric 
of Canterbury in 1161, — the enactment in 1164 of the Constitu- 
tions of Clarendon, by which the clergy, a body essentially 
foreign in feeling and to a great extent even of foreign birth, 
were brought somewhat more under subjection to the law of the 
land — and the Conquest of Ireland in 1172, to the vast exalta- 
tion of the English name and power. 

What was the history of the vernacular language for this first 
century and a half after the Norman Conquest, throughout 
which everything native would thus seem to have been in a 
course of gradual re-emergence from the general foreign inunda- 
tion that had overwhelmed the country ? We have no historical 
record or statement as to this matter : the question can only be 
answered, in so far as it can be answered at all, from an examina- 
tion of such compositions of the time in the vernacular tongue 
as may have come down to us. 

The principal literature produced in England during this 
period was in the Latin and French languages. In the fonner 
were written most works on subjects of theology, philosophy, 
and history; in the latter most of those intended rather to 
amuse than to inform, and addressed, not to students and pro- 
fessional readers, but to the idlers of the court and the upper 
classes, by whom they were seldom actually read, or much 
expected to be read, but only listened to as they were recited 
* See Sir H. Spelman, Concilia ; ad an. 1116. 



VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 59 

or clianted (for most of them were in verse) by others. How 
far over society such a knowledge of the imported tongue came 
to extend as was requisite for the understanding and enjoyment 
of what was thus written in it has been matter of dispute. The 
Abbe de la Eue conceives that a large propoi-tion even of the 
middle classes, and of the town population generally, must have 
been so far frenchified ; but later authorities look upon this as an 
extravagant supposition. 

It is, at all events, this French literature only that is to be 
considered as having come into competition with, or to have 
t^ken the place of, the old vernacular literature. The employ- 
ment of the Latin language in wi'iting by monks, secular church- 
men, and other persons who had had a learned education, was 
what had always gone on in England as in every other country 
pf Western Christendom ; there was nothing new in that ; we 
continue to have it after the Conquest just as we had it before 
the Conquest. But it is quite otherwise with the writing of 
French ; that was altogether a new thing in England, and indeed 
ver}^ much of a new thing everywhere, in the eleventh century : 
no specimen of composition in the Langue d'Oyl, in fact, either in 
verse or in prose, has come down to us from beyond that century, 
nor is there reason to believe that it had been much earlier 
turned to account for literary purposes even in France itself. 
The great mass of the oldest French literature that has been 
preserved was produced in England, or, at any rate, in 
the dominions of the King of England, in the twelfth cen- 
tury. 

To whatever portion of society in England an acquaintance 
with this French literature was confined, it is evident that it was 
for some time after the Conquest the only literature of the .day 
that, without addressing itself exclusively to the learned classes, 
still demanded some measure of cultivation in its readers or 
auditors as well as in its authors. It was the only popular lite- 
rature that was not adapted to the mere populace. We might 
infer this even from the fact that, if any other ever existed, it has 
mostly perished. The various metrical chronicles, romances, 
and other compositions in the French tongue, of the principal 
of which an account has been given, are very nearly the only 
literary works which have come down to us from this age. And, 
while the mass of this produce that has been preserved is, as we 
have seen, very considerable, we have distinct notices of much 
more which is now lost. How the French language should 
have acquired the position which it thus appears to have held in 
England for some time after the Conquest is easily explained. 



60 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

The advantage wMcli it derived from being the language of the 
court, of the entire body of the nobility, and of the opulent and 
influential classes generally, is obvious. This not only gave it 
the prestige and attraction of what we now call fashion, but, in 
the circumstances to which the country was reduced, would very 
speedily make it the only language in which any kind of regular 
or grammatical training could be obtained. With the native 
population almost everywhere deprived of its natural leaders, 
the old landed proprietary of its Own blood, it cannot be sup- 
posed that schools in which the reading and writing of the 
vernacular tongue was taught could continue to subsist. This 
has been often pointed out. But what we may call the social 
cause, or that arising out of the relative conditions of the two 
races, was probably assisted by another which has not been so 
much attended to. The languages themselves did not compete 
upon fair terms. The French would have in the general esti- 
mation a decided advantage for the purposes of literature over 
the English. The latter was held universally to be merely a 
barbarous form of speech, claiming kindred with nothing except 
the other half-articulate dialects of the woods, hardl}^ one of 
which had ever known what it was to have any acquaintance 
with letters, or was conceived even by those who spoke it to be 
fit to be used in writing except on the most vulgar occasions, or 
where anything like either dignity or precision of expression 
was of no importance ; the former, although somewhat soiled 
and disfigured by ill usage received at the hands of the un- 
educated multitude, and also only recently much employed in 
formal or artistic eloquence, could still boast the most honour- 
able of all pedigrees as a daughter of the Latin, and was thus 
besides allied to the popular speech of every more civilized 
province of Western Christendom. The very name by which it 
had been known when it first attracted attention with reference 
to its literary capabilities was, as we have seen, the Eustio 
Latin, or Roman (Lingua liomana Rustica). Even without being 
favoured by circumstances, as it was in the present case, a 
tongue having these intrinsic recommendations would not have 
been easily worsted, in a contest for the preference as the organ 
of fashionable literature, by such a competitor as the unknown 
and unconnected English. 

There was only one great advantage possessed by the national 
tongue with which it was impossible for the other in the long run 
to cope. This was the fact of its being the national tongue, the 
speech, actual and ancestral, of the great body of the people. 
Even that, indeed, might not have enabled it to maintain its 



VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE; 61 

ground if it had been a mere unwritten form of speecli. But it 
had been cultivated and trained for centuries both by the 
practice of composition, in prose as well as in verse, and by the 
application to it of the art of the grammarian. It already pos- 
sessed a literature considerable in volume, and embracing a 
variety of departments. It was not merely something floating 
upon men's breath, but had a substantial existence in poems and 
histories, in libraries and parchments. In that state it might 
cease, in the storm of national calamity, to be generally either 
written or read, but even its more literary inflexions and con- 
structions would be less likely to fall into complete and universal 
oblivion. The memory, at least, of its old renown would not 
altogether die away ; and that alone would be found to be much 
when, after a time, it began to be again, although in a somewhat 
altered form, employed in writing. 

The nature of the altered form which distinguishes the written 
vernacular tongue when it reappears after the Korman Conquest 
from the aspect it presents before that date (or the earliest 
modern English from what is commonly designated Saxon or 
Anglo-Saxon) is not matter of dispute. " The substance of the 
change," to adopt the words of Mr. Price, the late learned editor 
of Warton, " is admitted on all hands to consist in the suppres- 
sion of those grammatical intricacies occasioned by the inflection 
of nouns, the seemingly arbitrary distinctions of gender, the 
government of prepositions, &c."* It was, in fact, the con- 
version of an inflectional into a non-inflectional, of a synthetic 
into an analytic, language. The syntactical connexion of words, 
and the modification of the mental conceptions which they 
represent, was indicated, no longer, in general, by those varia- 
tions which constitute what are called declension and conjugation, 
but by separate particles, or simply by juxtaposition ; and what- 
ever seemed to admit of being neglected without injury to the 
prime object of expressing the meaning of the speaker, or writer, 
— no matter what other purposes it might serve of a merely 
ornamental or artistic nature — was ruthlessly dispensed with. 

A change such as this is unquestionably the breaking up of a 
language. In the first instance, at least, it amounts to the 
destruction of much that is most characteristic of the language, 
— of all that constitutes its beauty to the educated mind, imbued 
with a feeling for the literature into which it has been wrought, 
— of something, probably, even of its precision as well as of its 
expressiveness in a higher sense. It has become, in a manner, 
but the skeleton of what it was, or the skeleton with only the 
* Preface to Warton's Hist, of Eng. Poetry, p. 86. 



62 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

skin hanging loose upon it : — all the covering and rounding flesh 
gone. Or we may say it is the language no longer with its old 
natural hearing and suitable attire, but reduced to the rags and 
squalor of a beggar. Or it may be compared to a material 
edifice, once bright with many of the attractions of decorative 
architecture, now stripped of all its splendours and left only a 
collection of bare and dilapidated walls. It may be, too, that, as 
is commonly assumed, a synthetic tongue is essentially a nobler 
and more effective instrument of expression than an analytic 
one, — that, often comprising a whole sentence, or at least a whole 
clause, in a word, it presents thoughts and emotions in flashes 
and pictures where the other can only employ comparatively 
dead conventional signs. But perhaps the comparison has been 
ix)0 commonly made between the synthetic tongue in its per- 
fection and the analytic one while only in its rudimentary state. 
The language may be considered to have changed its constitution, 
somewhat like a country which should have ceased to be a 
monarchy and become a republic. The new political system 
could only be fairly compared with the old one, and the balance 
struck between the advantages of the one and those of the other, 
after the former should have had time fully to develop itself 
under the operation of its own peculiar principles. Even if it 
be inferior upon the whole, and for the highest purposes, an 
analytic language may perhaps have some recommendations 
which a synthetic one does not possess. It may not be either 
more natural or, properly speaking, more simple, for the original 
constitution of most, if not of all, languages seems to have been 
synthetic, and a synthetic language is as easy both to acquire 
and to wield as an analytic one to those to whom it is native ; 
nor can the latter be said to be more rational or philosophical 
than the former, for, as being in the main natural products, and 
not artificial contrivances, languages must be held to stand all 
on an equality in respect of the reasonableness at least of the 
principle on which they are constituted; but yet, if compa- 
ratively defective in poetical expressiveness, analytic languages 
will probably be found, whenever they have been sufficiently 
cultivated, to be capab e, in pure exposition, of rendering 
thought with superior minuteness and distinctness of detail. 
With their small tenacity or cohesion, they penetrate into every 
chink and fold, like water or fine dust. 

But the great question in every case of the apparent conver- 
sion of a synthetic into an analytic language is, how, or under 
the operation of what cause or causes, the change was brought 
about. In the particular case before us, for instance, what v/as 



VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 63 

it that converted the form of our vernacular tongue which we find 
alone employed in writing before the Norman Conquest into the 
comparatively uninflected form in which it appears in the 
generality of the compositions which have come down to us from 
the first ages after that great political and social catastrophe ? 

First, however, we may remark that there is no proof of the 
latter form having been really new, or of recent origin, about the 
time of the Conquest. All that we can assert is, that soon after 
that date it first appears in writing. If it was ever so employed 
before, no earlier specimens of it have been preserved. It was 
undoubtedl}'- the form of the language popularly in use at the 
time when it thus first presents itself in our national literature. 
But did it not exist as an oral dialect long before ? May it not 
have so existed from the remotest antiquity alongside of the 
more artificial form which was exclusively, or at least usually, 
employed in writing? It has been supposed that even the 
classical Greek and Latin, such as we find in books, may have 
always been accompanied each by another form of speech, of looser 
texture, and probably more of an analytical character, which 
served for the ordinary oral intercourse of the less educated 
population, and of which it has even been conjectured we may 
have some much disguised vestige or resemblance in the modern 
Eomaic and Italian. The rise, at any rate, of what was long a 
merely oral dialect into a language capable of being employed in 
literature, and of thereby being gradually so trained and im- 
proved as to supplant and take the place of the ancient more 
highly inflected and otherwise more artificial literary language of 
the country, is illustrated by what is known to have happened in 
France and other continental provinces of the old Empire of the 
West, where the Romana Rustica, as it was called, which was a 
corrupted or broken-down form of the proper Latin, after having 
been for some centuries only orally used, came to be written 
as well as spoken, and, having been first taken into the service 
of the more popular kinds of literature, ended by becoming the 
language of all literature and the only national speech. So in 
this country there may possibly have been in use for colloquial 
purposes a dialect of a similar character to our modern analytic 
Fnglish even from the earliest days of the old synthetic English ; 
and the two forms of the language, the regular and the irregu- 
lar, the learned and the vulgar, the mother and the daughter, or 
rather, if you will, the elder and the younger sister, may have 
subsisted together for many centuries, till there came a crisis 
which for a time laid the entire fabric of the old national 
civilization in the dust, when the rude and hardy character of 



64 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

the one carried it tlirongh the storm wliicli the more delicate 
structure of the other could not stand. 

Or was the T^aitten English of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries the same English (or Anglo-Saxon) that was written in 
the ninth and tenth, only modified by that process of gradual 
change the principle of wh^ch was inherent in the constitution of 
the language ? AYas the former neither the sister nor the daugh- 
ter of the latter, but the latter merely at a different stage of its 
natural gTowth ? This is the view that has been maintained by 
some eminent authorities. The late Mr. Price, acknowledging it 
to be u matter beyond dispute "that some change had taken 
place in the style of composition and general stiTicture of the 
language " from the end of the ninth to the end of the twelfth 
century, adds : — " But that these mutations were a consequence 
of the Norman invasion, or were even accelerated by that event, 
is wholl}^ incapable of proof ; and nothing is supported upon a 
firmer principle of rational induction, than that the same effects 
would have ensued if William and his followers had remained in 
their native soil."* The change, as we have seen, may be said to 
have amounted to the transformation of the language from one 
of a synthetic to one of an analytic constitution or structure ; 
but Mr. Price contends that, whether it is to be considered as the 
result of an innate law of the language, or of some general law 
in the organization of those who sjDoke it, its having been in no 
waj^ dependent upon external circumstances,— upon foreign 
influence or political disturbances, — is established by the undeni- 
able fact that every other language of the Low-German stock 
displays the same simplification of its grammar. " In all these 
languages," he observes, " there has been a constant tendency to 
relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol 
for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinc- 
tions, and detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of 
opinion. Yet, in thus diminishing their grammatical forms and 
simplifying their rules, in this common effort to evince a strik- 
ing contrast to the usual effects of civilization, all confusion has 
been prevented by the very manner in which the Of)eration has 
been conducted ; for the revolution produced has been so gradual 
in its progress, that it is only to be discovered on a comparison 
of the respective languages at periods of a considerable in- 
terval."! 

The interval that Mr. Price has taken in the present case is 
certainly wide enough. What has to be explained is the difference 
that we find between the written English of the middle of the 
* Preface to Warton, 85. f lb., 86, 



VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 65 

twelftli century and that, not of tlie age of Alfred, or the end of 
the ninth century, but rather of the end of the eleventh. The 
question is, how we are to account for a great change which 
would appear to have taken place in the language, as employed 
for literary purposes, not in three centuries, but in one century, 
or even in half a century. The English of Alfred continues to 
be in all respects the English of Alfric, who lived and wrote 
more than a century later. The National Chronicle, still 
wi'itten substantially in the old langTiage, comes down even to 
the year 1154. It is probable that we have here the continued 
employment, for the sake of unifoimity, of an idiom which had 
now become antique, or what is called dead ; but there is 
certainly no evidence or trace of any other form of the national 
speech having ever been used in writing before the year 1100 at 
the earliest. The overthrow of the native government and 
civilization by the Conquest in the latter part of the eleventh 
century would not, of course, extinguish the knowledge of the 
old literary language of the country till after the lapse of about 
a generation. We may fairly, then, regard the change in 
question as having taken place, in all probabilit}', not in three 
centuries, as Mr. Price puts the case, but within at most the 
third part of that space. This correction, while it brings the 
breaking up of the language into close connexion in point of time 
with the social revolution, gives it also much more of a sudden and 
convulsionary character than it has in Mr. Price's representation. 
The gradual and gentle flow, assumed to have extended over 
three centuries, turns out to have been really a rapid precipitous 
descent — something almost of the nature of a cataract — effected 
possibly within the sixth or eighth part of that space of time. 

It may be that there is a tendency in certain languages, or in 
all languages, to undergo a similar sim]Dlification of their gram- 
mar to that which the English underwent at this crisis. And it 
is conceivable that such a tendency constantly operating un- 
checked may at last produce such a change as we have in the 
present case, the conversion of the language from one of a 
synthetic to one of an analytic structure. That may have hap- 
pened with those other languages of the Low-Germanic stock to 
which Mr. Price refers. But such was certainly not the case 
with the English. We have that laoiguage distinctly before us 
for three or four centuries, during which it is not pretended that 
there is to be detected a. trace of the operation of any such 
tendency. The tendency, therefore, either did not exist, or 
must have been rendered inoperative by some counteracting 
influence. If, on the other hand, we are to suppose that, in our 



66 . ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

own or in any otlier language, tlie tendency suddenly developed 
itself or became active at a particular moment, that would 
necessarily imply the very operation of a new external cause 
which Mr. Price's theory denies. It is no matter whether we 
may or may not be able to point out the cause ; that a cause there 
must have been is unquestionable. 

In the case before us, the cause is sufficiently obvious. The 
integrity of the constitution or grammatical system of the 
language was preserved so long as its literature flourished ; 
when that ceased to be read and studied and produced, the 
grammatical cultivation and knowledge of the language also 
ceased. The two things, indeed, were really one and the same. 
The literature and the literary form of the language could not 
but live and die together. "VVhatever killed the one was sure 
also to blight the other. And what was it that did or could 
bring the native literature of Eu gland suddenly to an end in the 
eleventh or twelfth century except the new political and social 
circumstances in which the country Avas then placed ? ^^'hat 
other than such a cause ever extinguished in any country the 
light of its ancient literature ? 

Of at least two similar cases we have a perfect knowledge. 
How long did the classical Latin continue to be a living 
language ? Just so long as the fabric of Latin civilization in the 
Western Empire continued to exist ; so long, and no longer. 
When that was overthrown, the literature which was its pro- 
duct and exponent, its expression and in a manner its very soul, 
and the highly artificial form of language which was the material 
in whicli that literature was wrought, were both at once struck 
with a mortal disease under which they perished almost with the 
generation that had witnessed the consummation of the barbaric 
invasion. Exactly similar is the history of the classic Greek, 
only that it continued to exist as a living language for a 
thousand years after the Latin, the social system with which it 
was bound up, of which it was part and parcel, lasting so much 
longer. When that fell, with the fall of the Eastern Empire in 
the fifteenth century, the language also became extinct. The 
ancient Greek gave place to the modern Greek, or what is called 
the Eomaic. The conquest of Constantinople by the Turks was, S3 
far, to the Greek language the same thing that the Norman Con- 
quest was to the English. 



67 

The Thirteenth axd Fourteenth Centuries. — Ascendancy 
OF the Scholastic Philosophy. 

Ever since tlie appearance of Peter Lombard's Four Books of 
Sentences, about the middle of the twelfth century, a struggle 
for ascendancy had been going on thronghout Europe between 
the Scholastic Theology, or new philosophy, and the grammatical 
and rhetorical studies with which men had previously been 
chiefly occupied. At first the natural advantages of its position 
told in favour of the established learning ; nay an impulse and a 
new inspiration were probably given to poetry and the belles- 
lettres for a time by the competition of logic and philosophy, aud 
the general intellectual excitement thus produced : it was in 
the latter part of the twelfth century that the writing of Latin 
verse was cultivated with the greatest success ; it was at the 
very end of that century, indeed, that Geoffrey de Yinsauf, as we 
have seen, composed and published his poem on the restoration 
of the legitimate mode of versification, under the title of Nova 
Poetria, or the Xew Poetry. But from about this date the tide 
began to turn ; and the first half of the thirteenth century may 
be described as the era of the decline and fall of elegant litera- 
ture, and the complete reduction of studious minds under the 
dominion of the scholastic logic and metaphysics. 

In the University of Paris, and it was doubtless the same else- 
where, from about the middle of the thirteenth century, the 
ancient classics seem nearly to have ceased to be read ; and all that 
was taught of rhetoric, or even of grammar, consisted of a few 
lessons from Priscian. The habit of speaking Latin correctly 
and elegantly, which had been so common an accomplishment of 
the scholars of the last age, was now generally lost : even at the 
imiversities, the classic tongue was corrupted into a base jargon, 
in which frequently all gTammar and syntax were disregarded. 
This universal revolt from the study of words and of eesthetics to 
that of thoughts and of things is the most remarkable event in 
the intellectual history of the species. Undoubtedly all its 
results were not e^dl. On the whole, it was most probably the 
salvation even of that learning and elegant literature which it 
seemed for a time to have overwhelmed. The excitement of its 
very novelty awakened the minds of men. Never was there 
such a feiment of intellectual activity as now sprung up in 
Europe. The enthusiasm of the Crusades seemed to have been 
succeeded by an enthusiasm of study, which equally impelled its 
successive inundations of devotees. In the beginning of the 
fourteenth century there were thirty thousand students at the 



6-8 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

University of Oxford ; and that of Paris conld probably boast of 
the attendance of a still vaster multitude. This was something 
almost like a universal diffusion of education and knowledge. 
The brief revival of elegant literature in the twelfth century was 
a premature spring, which could not last. The preliminary pro- 
cesses of vegetation were not sufficiently advanced to sustain any 
general or enduring efflorescence ; nor was the state of the world 
such as to call for or admit of any extensive spread of the kind 
of scholarship then cultivated. The probability is, that, even if 
nothing else had taken its place, it would have gradually become 
feebler in character, as well as confined within a narrower circle 
of cultivators, till it had altogether evaporated and disappeared. 
The excitement of the new learning, turbulent and in some 
respects debasing as it was, saved Western Europe from the com- 
plete extinction of the light of scholarship and philosophy which 
would in that case have ensued, and kept alive the spirit of 
intellectual culture, though in the mean while imprisoned and 
limited in its vision, for a happier future time when it should 
have ampler scope and full freedom of range. 

Almost the on"ly studies now cultivated by the common herd 
of students were the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. Yet it 
was not till after a struggle of some length that the supremacy 
of Aristotle was established in the schools. The most ancient 
statutes of the University of Paris that have been presei-ved, 
those issued by the pope's legate, Eobert de Cour9on, in 1215, 
prohibited the reading either of the metaphysical or the physical 
works of that philosopher, or of any abridgment of them. This, 
however, it has been remarked, was a mitigation of the treatment 
these books had met with a few years before, when all the copies 
of them that could be found were ordered to be thrown into the 
fire.* Still more lenient was a decree of Pope Gregory IX. in 
1231, which only ordered the reading of them to be suspended 
until they should have undergone correction. Certain heretical 
notions in religion, promulgated or suspected to have been 
entertained by some of the most zealous of the early Aristotelians, 
had awakened the apprehensions of the Church ; but the general 
orthodoxy of their successors quieted these fears ; and in course 
of time the authority of the Stagirite was universally recognized 
both in theolog}^ and in the profane sciences. 

Some of the most distinguished of the scholastic doctors of this 
period were natives of Britain. Such, in particular, were Alex- 
ander de Hales, styled the Irrefragable, an English Franciscan, 
who died at Paris in 1245, and who is famous as the master of 
* Crevier, Histoire de I'Univ. de Paris, i. 318. 



MATHEMATICAL AND OTHER STUDIES. 69 

St. Bonaventura, and tlie first of the long list of commentators 
on the Four Books of the Sentences ; the Subtle Doctor, John 
Duns Scotus, also a Franciscan and the chief glory of that order, 
who, after teaching with unprecedented popularity and applause 
at Oxford and Paris, died at Cologne in 1308, at the early age 
of forty-thi'ee, leaving a mass of writings, the very quantity of 
which would be sufficiently wonderful, even if they were not 
marked by a vigour and penetration of thought which, down to 
our own day, has excited the admiration of all who have exa- 
mined them ; and William Occam, the Invincible, another Fran- 
ciscan, the pupil of Scotus, but afterwards his opponent on the 
gi'eat philosophical question of the origin and nature of Universals 
or General Terms, which so long divided, and still divides, logi- 
cians. Occam, who died at Munich in 1347, was the restorer, 
and perhaps the most able defender that the middle ages pro- 
duced, of the doctrine of Nominalism, or the opinion that general 
notions are merely names, and not real existences, as was con- 
tended by the Eealists. The side taken by Occam was that of the 
minorit}^ in his own day, and for many ages after, and his views 
accordingly were generally regarded as heterodox in the schools ; 
but his high merits have been recognized in modern times, when 
perhaps the greater number of speculators have come over to his 
way of thinking. 

Mathematical asd other Studies. 

In the mathematical and physical sciences, Eoger Bacon is the 
great name of the thirteenth century, and indeed the greatest 
that either his country or Europe can produce for some centuries 
after this time. He was born at Ilchester about the year 1214, 
and died in 1292. His writings that are still preserved, of which 
the principal is that entitled his Opus Majus (or Greater Work), 
show that the range of his investigations included theology, 
grammar, the ancient languages, geometry, astronomy, chrono- 
logy, geography, music, optics, mechanics, chemistryj and most 
of the other branches of experimental philosophy. In all these 
sciences he had mastered whatever was then known ; and his 
knowledge, though necessarily mixed with much error, extended 
in various directions considerably farther than, but for the evidence 
of his ^^Titings, we should have been warranted in believing that 
scientific researches had been carried in that age. In optics, for 
instance, he not only understood the general laws of reflected 
and refracted light, and had at least conceived such an instru- 
ment as a telescope, but he makes some advances towards an 



70 ENGLISH LITERATURE AXD LANGUAGE. 

explanation of the phenomena of the rainbow. It may be 
doubted whether what have been sometimes called his inventions 
and discoveries in mechanics and in chemistry were for the 
greater part more thai] notions he had formed of the possibility 
of accomplishing certain results ; but, even regarded as mere 
speculations or conjectures, many of his statements of what 
might be done show that he was familiar with mechanical prin- 
ciples, and possessed considerable acquaintance with the powers 
of natural agents. He appears to have been acquainted with the 
effects and composition of gunpowder, which indeed there is 
other evidence for believing to have been then known in Europe. 
Bacon's notions on the right method of philosophizing are remark- 
ably enlightened for the times in which he lived; and his general 
views upon most subjects evince a penetration and liberality 
much beyond the spirit of his age. With all his sagacity and 
freedom from prejudice, indeed, he was a believer both in astro- 
log}^ and alchemy ; but, as it has been observed, these delusions 
did not then stand in the same predicament as now : they were 
" irrational only because unproved, and neither imj)ossible nor 
unworthy of the investigation of a philosopher, in the absence 
of preceding experiments."* 

Another eminent English cultivator of mathematical science 
in that age was the celebrated Eobert Grosseteste, or G-rostete, or 
Grosthead, bishop of Lincoln, the friend and patron of Bacon. 
Grostete, who died in 1253, and of whom we shall have more to say 
presently, is the author of a treatise on the sphere, which had been 
printed. A third name that deserves to be mentioned along with 
these is that of Sir Michael Scott, famous in popular tradition as 
a practitioner of the occult sciences, but whom his writings, of 
which several are extant, and have been printed, prove to have 
been possessed of acquirements, both in science and literature, 
of which few in those times could boast. He is commonly as- 
sumed to have been proprietor of the estate of Balwearie, in 
Fife, and to have STirvived till near the close of the thirteenth 
century ; but all that is certain is that he was a native of Scot- 
land, and one of the most distinguished of the learned persons 

* Penny Cyclopsedia, ill. 243. Bacon's principal work, the Opus Majus, was 
published by Dr. Jebb, in a folio volume, at London in 1733 ; and several of 
his other treatises had been previously printed at Francfort, Paris, and else- 
where. His Opus Minus has also now been edited by Professor Brewer, of 
King's College, London, and forms one of the volumes of the series entitled 
Eerum Britannicarum Medii M\i Scriptores, or Chronicles and Memorials of 
Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages ; published by the authority 
of Her Majesty's Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Kolls, 
8vo. London, 1857, &c. 



ASTROLOGY AND ALCHEMY. 71 

wlio flourislied at the court of the Emperor Frederick II., who 
died in 1250.* Like Eoger Bacon, Scott was addicted to the 
study of alchemy and astrology ; but these were in his eyes also 
parts of natural philosophy. Among other works, a History of 
Animals is ascribed to him; and he is said to have translated 
several of the works of Aristotle from the Greek into Latin, at 
the command of the Emperor Frederick. He is reputed to have 
been eminently skilled both in astronomy and medicine ; and a 
contemporary, John Bacon, himself known by the title of Prince 
of the Averroists, or followers of the Arabian doctor Averroes, 
celebrates him as a great theologian. f 

These instances, however, were rare exceptions to the general 
rule. Metaphysics and logic, together with divinity — which 
was converted into little else than a subject of metaphysical and 
logical contention — so occupied the crowd of intellectual inquirers, 
that, except the professional branches of law and medicine, scarcely 
any other studies were generally attended to. Eoger Bacon him- 
self tells us that he knew of only two good mathematicians among 
his contemporaries — one John of Leyden, who had been a pupil 
of his own, and another whom he does not name, but who is 
supposed to have been John Peckham, a Franciscan friar, who 
afterwards became archbishop of Canterbury. Few students of 
the science, he says, proceeded farther than the fifth proposition 
of the first book of Euclid — the well-known asses' bridge. The 
study of geometry was still confounded in the popular under- 
standing with the study of magic — a proof that it was a very rare 
pursuit. In arithmetic, although the Arabic numerals had found 
their way to Christian Europe before the middle of the fourteenth 
century, they do not appear to have come into general use till 
a considerably later date. Astronomy, however, was sufSciently 
cultivated at the University of Paris to enable some of the mem- 
bers to predict an eclipse of the sun which happened on the 31st 
of January, 131 O.J This science was indebted for part of the 
attention it received to the belief that was universally enter- 
tained in the influence of the stars over human affairs. And, as 
astrology led to the cultivation and improvement of astronomy, 
so the other imaginary science of alchemy undoubtedly aided the 
progress of chemistrj^ and medicine. Besides Roger Bacon and 
Michael Scott in the thirteenth century, England contributes 
the names of John Daustein, of Richard, and of Cremer abbot 
of Westminster, the disciple and friend of the famous Raymond 

* See article in Penny Cyclopaedia, xxi. 101. 
t See an article on Michael Scott in Bayle. 
t Crevier, ii. 224. 



72 



ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 



Lnlly, to the list of the writers on alchemy in the fourteenth. 
Lully himself Adsited England in the reign of Edward I., on the 
invitation of the king ; and he afSrms in one of his works, that, 
in the secret chamber of St. Katharine in the Tower of London, 
he performed in the rojool presence the experiment of trans- 
muting some crystal into a mass of diamond, or adamant as he 
calls it, of which Edward, he says, caused some little pillars to 
be made for the tabernacle of God. It was popularly believed, 
indeed, at the time, that the English king had been furnished by 
Lully with a great quantity of gold for defraying the expense 
of an expedition he intended to make to the Holy Land. 
Edward III. was not less credulous on the subject than his 
grandfather, as appears by an order which he issued in 1329, in 
the following terms : — " Know all men, that we have been assured 
that John of Rous and Master William of Dalby know how to 
make silver by the art of alchemy ; that they have made it in 
former times, and still continue to make it ; and, considering 
that these men, by their art, and by making the precious metal, 
may be profitable to us and to our kingdom, we have com- 
manded our well-beloved Thomas Gary to apprehend the afore- 
said John and William, wherever they can be found, within 
liberties or without, and bring them to us, together with all the 
instruments of their art, under safe and sure custody." The 
earliest English writer on medicine, whose works have been 
printed, is Gilbert English (or Anglicus), who flourished in the 
thirteenth century ; and he was followed in the next century by • 
John de Gaddesden. The practice of medicine had now been 
taken in a great measure out of the hands of the clergy ; but the 
art was still in the greater part a mixture of superstition and 
quackery, although the knowledge of some useful remedies, and 
perhaps also of a few principles, had been obtained from the 
writings of the Arabic physicians (many of which had been 
translated into Latin) and from the instructions delivered in the 
schools of Spain and Italy. The distinction between the phy- 
sician and the apothecary was already well understood. Surgery 
also began to be followed as a separate branch : some works are 
still extant, partly printed, partly in manuscript, by John 
ArdeiTL, or Arden, an eminent English surgeon, who practised at 
Newark in the fourteenth century. A lively picture of the state 
of the surgical art at this period is given by a French writer, 
Guy de Cauliac, in a system of surgery which he published in 
1363: " The practitioners in surgery," he says, "are divided 
into five sects. The first follow Eoger and Eoland, and the four 
masters, and apply poultices to all wounds and abscesses; the 



UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES. 73 

second follow Brunus and Theodoric, and in the same cases nse 
wine only; the third follow Saliceto and Lanfranc, and treat 
wounds with ointments and soft plasters ; the fourth are chiefly 
Germans, who attend the armies, and promiscuously use charms, 
potions, oil, and wool; the fifth are old women and ignorant 
people, who have recourse to the saints in all cases." 

Yet the true method of philosophising, by experiment and the 
collection of facts, was almost as distinctly and emphatically laid 
down in this age by Eoger Bacon, as it was more than three 
centuries afterwards by his ilkistrious namesake. Much know- 
ledge, too, must necessarily have been accumulated in various 
departments by the actual application of this method. Some of 
the greatest of the modern chemists have bestowed the highest 
praise on the manner in which the experiments of the alche- 
mists, or hermetic philosophers, as they called themselves, on 
metals and other natural substances appear to have been con- 
ducted. In another field — namely, in that of geography, and 
the institutions, customs, and general state of distant countries — 
a great deal of new information must have been acquired from the 
accounts that were now published by various travellers, especially 
by Marco Polo, who penetrated as far as to Tartary and China, in 
the latter part of the thirteenth century, and by our country- 
man. Sir John Mandevil, who also traversed a great part of the 
East about a hundred years later. Eoger Bacon has inserted a 
very curious epitome of the geographical knowledge of his time 
in his Opus Majus. 



Universities and Colleges. 

About the middle of the thirteenth century, both in England 
and elsewhere, the universities began to assume a new form, by 
the erection of colleges for the residence of their members as 
separate communities. The zeal for learning that was displayed 
in these endowments is the most honourable characteristic of the 
age. Before the end of the fourteenth century the following 
colleges were founded at Oxford : — University Hall, by William, 
archdeacon of Durham, who died in 1249 ; Baliol College, by 
John Baliol, father of King John of Scotland, about 1263 ; Mer- 
ton College, by Walter Merton, bishop of Eochester, in 1268 ; 
Exeter College, by Walter Stapleton, bishop of Exeter, about 
1315 ; Oriel College, originally called the Hall of the Blessed 
Virgin of Oxford, by Edward TI. and his almoner, Adam de 
Brom, about 1324; Queen's College, by Eobert Eglesfield, chap- 
lain to Queen Philippa, in 1340 ; and New College, in 1379, by 



74 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tlie celebrated William of Wykeliam, bishop of Winchester, the 
munificent founder also of Winchester School or College. In 
the University of Cambridge the foundations were, Peter House, 
by Hugh Balsham, sub-prior and afterwards bishop of EI5', about 
1256 ; Michael College (afterwards incorporated with Trinity 
College), by Herby de Stanton, Chancellor of the Exchequer to 
Edward 11. , about 1324; University Hall (soon afterwards 
burnt down), by Kichard Badew, Chancellor of the University, 
in 1326 ; King's Hall (afterwards united to Trinity College), by 
Edward III. ; Clare Hall, a restoration of University Hall, by 
Elizabeth de Clare, Countess of Ulster, about 1347 ; Pembroke 
Hall, or the Hall of Yalence and Mary, in the same year, by 
Mary de St. Paul, widow of Aymer de Yalence, Earl of Pem- 
broke ; Trinity Hall, in 1350, by William Bateman, bishop of 
Korwich ; Gonvil Hall, about the same time, by Edmond Gonvil, 
parson of Terrington and Pushworth, in Norfolk ; and Corpus 
Christi, or Ben'et (that is, Benedict) College, about 1351, by the 
United Guilds of Corpus Christi and St. Mary, in the town of Cam- 
bridge. The erection of these colleges, besides the accommoda- 
tions which they afforded in various ways both to teachers and 
students, gave a permanent establishment to the universities, 
which they scarcely before possessed. The original condition of 
these celelDrated seats of learning, in regard to all the conve- 
niences of teaching, appears to have been humble in the extreme. 
Great disorders and scandals are also said to have arisen, before 
the several societies were thus assembled each within its own 
walls, from the intermixture of the students with the townspeople, 
and their exemption from all discipline. But, when the members 
of the University were counted by tens of thousands, discipline, 
even in the most favourable circumstances, must have been 
nearly out of the question. The difficulty would not be lessened 
by the general character of the persons composing the learned 
mob, if we may take it from the quaint historian of the Univer- 
sity of Oxford. Man}^ of them, Anthony a Wood affirms, were 
mere " varlets who pretended to be scholars ;" he does not 
scruple to charge them with being habitually guilty of thieving 
and other enormities ; and he adds, " They lived under no dis- 
cipline, neither had any tutors, but only for fashion sake would 
sometimes thrust themselves into the schools at ordinary lec- 
tures, and, when they went to perform any mischiefs, then would 
they be accounted scholars, that so they might free themselves 
from the jurisdiction of the burghers." To repress the evils 
of this state of things, the old statutes of the University of Paris, 
in 1215, had ordained that no one should be reputed a scholar 



UXIYEESITIES AlsD COLLEGES. 75 

who had not a certain master. Another of these ancient regu- 
lations may be quoted in illustration of the simplicitj of the 
times, and of the small measure of pomp and circumstance that 
the heads of the commonwealth of learning could then affect. 
It is ordered that every master reading lectures in the faculty 
of arts should have his cloak or gov^Ti round, black, and falling 
as low as the heels — " at least," adds the statute, with amusing 
naivete, " while it is new." But this famous seminary long con- 
tinued to take pride in its poverty as one of its most honourable 
distinctions. There is something very noble and affecting in 
the terms in which the rector and masters of the faculty of arts 
are foimd petitioning, in 1362, for a postponement of the 
hearing of a cause in which they were parties. " We have diffi- 
culty," they say, " in finding the money to pay the procurators 
and advocates, whom it is necessary for us to employ — we whose 
profession it is to possess no wealth." * Yet, when funds were wanted 
for important purposes in connexion with learning or science, 
they were supplied in this age with no stinted liberality. We 
have seen with what alacrity opulent persons came forward to 
build and endow colleges, as soon as the expediency of such 
foundations came to be perceived. In almost all these establish- 
ments more or less provision was made for the permanent main- 
tenance of a body of poor scholars, in other words, for the 
admission of even the humblest classes to a share in the benefits 
of that learned education whose temples and priesthood were 
thus planted in the land. It is probable, also, that the same 
kind of liberality was often sho^vn in other ways. Eoger Bacon 
tells us himself that, in the twenty years in which he had been 
engaged in his experiments, he had spent in books and instru- 
ments no less a sum than two thousand "French livres, an amount 
of silver equal to about six thousand pounds of our present 
money, and in effective value certainly to many times that sum. 
He must have been indebted for these large supplies to the 
generosity of rich friends and patrons. 



CULTIYATIOX AND EMPLOYMENT OF THE LeARNED ToXGUES IN THE 

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. 

Kot withstanding the general neglect of its elegancies, and of 
the habit of speaking it correctly or grammatically, the Latin 
tongue still continued to be in England, as elsewhere, the 
common language of the learned, and that in which books were 
generally written that were intended for their perusal. Among 
* Crevier, ii. 404, 



76 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tMs class of works may be included the contemporary chronicles, 
most of which were compiled in the monasteries, and the authors 
of almost all of which were churchmen. 

Latin was also, for a great part of the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries, the usual language of the law, at least in writing. 
There may, indeed, be some doubt perhaps as to the Charter of 
John. It is usually given in Latin ; but there is also a French 
text first published in the first edition of D'Achery's Spicilegium 
(1653-57), xii. 573, &c., which there is some reason for believing 
to be the original. " An attentive critical examination of the 
French and Latin together," says Mr, Luders, " will induce 
any person capable of making it to think several chapters of the 
latter translated from the former, and not originally composed in 
Latin,"* Yet the Capitula, or articles on which the Great 
Charter is founded, are known to us only in Latin. And all the 
other charters of liberties are in that language. So is every 
statute down to the year 1275. The first that is in French is the 
Statute of Westminster the First, passed in that year, the 3rd of 
Edward I. Throughout the remainder of the reign of Edward 
they are sometimes in Latin, sometimes in French, but more 
frequently in the former language. The French becomes more 
frequent in the time of Edward 11. , and is almost exclusively 
used in that of Edward III. and Eichard II. Still there are 
statutes in Latin in the sixth and eighth years of the last-men- 
tioned king. It is not improbable that, from the accession of 
Edward L, the practice may have been to draw up every statute 
in both languages. Of the law treatises, Bracton (about 1265) 
and Fleta (about 1285) are in Latin; Britton (about 1280) and 
the Miroir des Justices (about 1320), in French. 

Latin was not only the language in which all the scholastic 
divines and philosophers wrote, but was also employed by all 
writers on geometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and the 
other branches of mathematical and natural science. All the 
works of Eoger Bacon, for example, are in Latin; and it is 
worth noting that, although by no means a writer of classical 
purity, this distinguished cultivator of science is still one of the 
most correct writers of his time. He was indeed not a less 
zealous student of literature than of science, nor less anxious for 
the improvement of the one than of the other : accustomed him- 
self to read the works of Aristotle in the original Greek, he 
denounces as mischievous impositions the wretched Latin trans- 

* Tracts on the Law and History of England (1810), p. 393. D'Achery's 
Fiench text may also be read in a more common book, Jolinson's History of 
Magna Charta, 2nd edit. (1772), pp. 182—234. 



ORIENTAL LEARNING. 77 

lations by which alone they were known to the generality of his 
contemporaries : he warmly recommends the study of grammar 
and the ancient languages generally; and deplores the little 
attention paid to the Oriental tongues in particular, of which he 
says there were not in his time more than three or four persons 
in Western Europe who knew anything. It is remarkable that 
the most strenuous effort made within the piesent period to 
revive the study of this last-mentioned learning proceeded from 
another eminent cultivator of natural science, the famous Eay- 
mond Lully, half philosopher, half quack, as it has been the 
fashion to regard him. It was at his instigation that Clement V., 
in 1311, with the approbation of the Council of Yienne, published 
a constitution, ordering that professors of Greek, Hebrew, 
Arabic, and Chaldaic should be established in the universities of 
Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. He had, more than 
twenty years before, urged the same measure upon Honorius IV., 
and its adoption then was only prevented by the death of that 
pope. After all, it is doubtful if the papal ordinance w^as ever 
carried into effect. There were, however, professors of strange, 
or foreign, languages at Paris a few years after this time, as 
appears from, an epistle of Pope John XXII. to his legate there 
in 1325, in which the latter is enjoined to keep watch over the 
said professors, lest they should introduce any dogmas as strange 
as the languages they taught.* 

Many additional details are collected by Warton in his 
Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning into England. 
He is inclined to think that many Greek manuscripts found 
their way into Europe from Constantinople in the time of the 
Crusades. " Kobert Grosthead, bishop of Lincoln," he proceeds, 
" an universal scholar, and no less conversant in polite letters 
than the most abstruse sciences, cultivated and patronized the 
study of the Greek language. This illustrious prelate, who is 
said to have composed almost two hundred books, read lectures 
in the school of the Franciscan friars at Oxford about the year 
1230. He translated Dionysius the Areopagite and Damascenus 
into Latin. He greatly facilitated the knowledge of Greek by 
a translation of Suidas's Lexicon, a book in high repute among 
the lower Greeks, and at that time almost a recent compilation. 
He promoted John of Basingstoke to the archdeaconry of 
Leicester, chiefly because he was a Greek scholar, and possessed 
many Greek manuscripts, which he is said to have brought from 
Athens into England. He entertained, as a domestic in his 
palace, Nicholas, chaplain of the abbot of St. Albans, sumamed 
* Crevier, Hist, de rUniv. de Paris, ii. 112, 227. 



78 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Grcecus, from Ms Tinconnnon proficiency in Greek ; and by his 
assistance lie translated from Greek into Latin the testaments of 
tlie twelve patriarciis. Grosthead liad almost incnrred the 
censure of excommunication for preferring a complaint to the 
pope that most of the opulent benefices in England were occu- 
pied b}^ Italians. But the practice, although notoriously founded 
on the monopolizing and arbitrary spirit of papal imposition, 
and a manifest act of injustice to the English clergy, probably 
contributed to introduce many learned foreigners into England, 
and to propagate philological literature.''"* " Bishop Grosthead," 
Wai-ton adds, " is also said to have been profoundly skilled in 
the Hebrew language. William the Conqueror permitted great 
numbers of Jews to come over from Eouen, and to settle in 
England, about the year 1087. Their multitude soon increased, 
and they spread themselves in vast bodies throughout most of 
the cities and capital towns in England, where they built syna- 
gogues. There were fifteen hundred at York about the year 
1189. At Bury in Suffolk is a very complete remain of a Jewish 
synagogue of stone, in the Norman style, lajge and magnificent. 
Hence it was that many of the learned English ecclesiastics of 
those times became acquainted with their books and language. 
In the reign of William Eufus, at Oxford the Jews were re- 
markably numerous, and had acquired a considerable property ; 
and some of their rabbis were permitted to open a school in the 
university, where they instructed not only their own people, 
but man}^ Chi'istian students, in the Hebrew literature, about the 
year 1054. Within two hundred years after their admission or 
establishment by the Conqueror, they were banished the king- 
dom. This circumstance was highly favourable to the circulation 
of their learning in England. The suddenness of their dis- 
mission obliged them, for present subsistence, and other reasons, 
to sell their moveable goods of all kinds, among which were large 
quantities of Eabbinical books. The monks in various parts 
availed themselves of the distribution of these treasures. At 
Huntingdon and Stamford there was a prodigious sale of their 
effects, containing immense stores of Hebrew manuscripts, which 
were immediately purchased by Gregory of Huntingdon, prior 
. of the abbey of Eamsey. Gregory speedily became an adept in 
the Hebrew, by means of these valuable acquisitions, which he 
bequeathed to his monastery about the year 1250. Other mem- 
bers of the same convent, in consequence of these advantages, 
are said to have been equal proficients in the same language, 
soon after the death of .Prior Gregory ; among whom were 
* Hist, of En^. Poet., 1. cxxxv. 



LAST AGE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE. ' 19 

Eobert Dodford, librarian of Eamsey, and Laurence Holbeck, 
who compiled a Hebrew Lexicon. At Oxfoid, great multitudes 
of their books fell into the hands of Eoger Bacon, or were bought 
by his brethren, the Franciscan friars of that uniYersity."* The 
general expulsion of the Jews from England did not take place 
till the year 1290, in the reign of Edward I. ; but they had been 
repeatedly subjected to sudden violence, both from the populace 
and from the government, before that grand catastrophe. 



Last Age of the French Language in England. 

The French language, however, was still in common use 
among us down to the latter part of the reign of Edward III. 
It is well remarked by Pinkerton that we are to date the ces- 
sation of the general use of French in this country from the 
breaking out of " the inveterate enmity " between the two 
nations in the reign of that king.j Higden, as we have seen, 
writing before this change had taken place, tells us that French 
was still in his day the language which the children of gentle- 
men were taught to speak from their cradle, and the only 
language that was allowed to be used by boys at school ; the 
effect of which was, that even the country people generally 
understood it and affected its use. The tone, however, in which 
this is stated by Higden indicates that the public feeling had 
already begun to set in against these customs, and that, if they 
still kept their ground from use and wont, they had lost their 
hold upon any firmer or surer stay. Accordingly about a quarter 
of a century or thirty years later his translator Trevisa finds it 
necessa.ry to subjoin the following explanation or correction : — 
" This maner was myche yused tofore the first moreyn [before 
the first murrain or plague, which happened in 1349], and is 
siththe som dele [somewhat] ychaungide. For John Cornwaile, 
a maister of gramer, chaungide the lore [learning] in gramer scole 
and construction of [from] Frensch into Englisch, and Eichard 
Pencriche lerned that maner teching of him, and other men of 
Pencriche. So that now, the yere of owre Lord a thousand thre 
hundred foure score and fy ve, of the secunde King Eychard after 
the Conc[uest nyne, in alle the gramer scoles of England children 
leveth Frensch, and construeth and lerneth an [in] Englisch, and 

* Hist, of Eng. Poet., i. cxxxvi. 

t Essay on the Origin of Seotish Poetry, prefixed to Ancient Scotish 
Poems, 1786, voL i. p. Ixiii, Some curious remarks upon the peciiliar political 
position in which England was held to stand in relation to France in the first 
reigns after the Conquest may be read in Gale's Preface to his Scriptores 
Ouindecim. 



80 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

haveth thereby avauntage in oon [one] side and desavauntage in 
anotlier. Her [their] avauntage is, that thei lerneth her [their] 
gramer in lasse tyme than children were wont to do ; desavaun- 
tage is, that now children of gramer scole kunneth [know] no 
more Frensch than can her lifte [knows their left] heele ; and 
that is harm for hem [them], and [if] thei schnl passe the see and 
travaile in strange londes, and in many other places also. Also 
gentilmen haveth now mych ylefte for to teche her [their] chil^ 
dren Frensch."* 

A few years before this, in 1362 (the 36th of Edward III.), 
was passed the statute ordaining that all pleas pleaded in the 
king's courts should be pleaded in the English language, and 
entered and enrolled in Latin ; the pleadings, or oral arguments, 
till now having been in French, and the enrolments of the 
judgments sometimes in French, sometimes in Latin. The 
reasons assigned for this change in the j)reamble of the act are : 
*' Because it is often showed to the king by the prelates, dukes, 
earls, barons, and all the commonalty, of the great mischiefs 
which have happened to divers of the realm, because the laws, 
customs, and statutes of this i-ealm be not commonly holden and 
kept in the same realm, for that they be pleaded, shewed, and 
judged in the French tongue, which is much unknown in the 
said realm, so that the people which do implead, or be impleaded, 
in the king's court, and in the courts of other, have no know- 
ledge nor understanding of that which is said for them or against 
them by their sergeants and other pleaders ; and that reasonably 
the said laws and customs the rather shall be perceived and 
known, and better understood, in the tongue used in the said 
realm, and by so much every man of the said realm may the 
better govern himself without offending of the law, and the 
better keep, save, and defend his heritage and possessions ; and 
in divers regions and countries, where thf^ king, the nobles, and 
other of the said realm have been, good governance and full right 
is done to every person, because that their laws and customs be 
learned and used in the tongue of the country." 

Yet, oddly enough, this very statute (of which we have here 
quoted the old translation) is in French, which, whatever might 
be the case with the great body of the people, continued down 
to a considerably later date than this to be the mother-tongue of 
our Norman royal family, and probably also that generally 
spoken at court and at least in the upper house of parliament. 
Eitson asserts that there is no instance in which Henry III. is 

* As quoted by Tyrwhitt, from Harl. MS, 1900, in Essay on the Language, 
■&c., of Oliaucer. 



LAST AGE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE. 81 

known to have expressed himself in Englisli. " King Edward I. 
generally," he continues, " or, according to Andrew of Wyntonn, 
constantly, spoke the French language, both in the council and 
in the field, many of his sayings in that idiom being recorded by 
our old historians. TVhen, in the council at Norham, in 1291-2, 
Anthony Beck had, as it is said, proved to the king, by reason 
and eloquence, that Bruce was too dangerous a neighbour to be 
king of Scotland, his Majesty replied. Par le sang de dieu, vous aves 
hien eschante, and accordingly adjudged the crown to Baliol ; of 
whom, refusing to obey his summons, he afterwards said, A ce fol 
felon tel folk fais ? SHI ne voult venir a nous, nous viendrons a lui* 
There is but one instance of his speaking English; which was 
when the great sultan sent ambassadors, after his assassination, 
to protest that he had no knowledge of it. These, standing at a 
distance, adored the king, prone on the ground ; and Edward said 
in English (in Anglico), You, indeed, adore, hut you little love, me. 
Nor understood they his words, because they spoke to him by an 
intei^reter.f King Edward II., likewise, who married a French 
princess, used himself the French tongue. Sir Henry Spelman 
had a manuscript, in which was a piece of poetry entitled De le 
roi Edward le fiz roi Edward, le chanson qu'il fist mesmes, which Ijord 
Orford was unacquainted with. His son Edward III. always 
wrote his letters or despatches in French, as we find them pre- 
served by Eobert of Avesbury ; and in the early part of his reign 
even the Oxford scholars were confined in conversation to Latin 
or French. J .... There is a single instance preserved of this 
monarch's use of the English language. He appeared in 1349 in 
a tournament at Canterbury with a white swan for his impress, 
and the following motto embroidered on his shield : — 

Hay, hay, the wythe swan ! 
By Godes soul I am thy man ! § 

Lewis Beaumont, bishop of Durham, 1317, understood not a 
word of either Latin or English. In reading the bull of his 
appointment, which he had been taught to spell for several days 
before, he stumbled upon the word metropolitice, which he in vain 
endeavoured to pronounce; and, having hammered over it a 

* For these two speeches, the latter of which, by-the-by, he points as if he 
did not understand it, Kitson quotes the Scotichronicon (Fordun), ii. 147, 156. 

t For this anecdote Eitson quotes Hemingford (in Gale), p. 591 . 

X The authority for this last statement is a note iD Warton's Hist, of Eng. 
Poet. i. 6 fedit. of 1824). 

§ " See Warton's Hist, of Eng. Poet. ii. 251 (i. 86, in edit, of 1824). He had 
another, ' It is as it is ;' and may have had a third, ' Ha St. Edward ! Ha 
St. George.' " 

G 



82 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

considerable time, at last cried out, in his mother tongue, Seif 
pour dite ! Par Seynt Lowys il ne fu pas curteis qui ceste parole id 
escrit* The first instance of the English language which Mr. 
Tyrwhitt had discovered in the parliamentary proceedings was 
the confession of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, in 1398. He 
might, however, have met with a petition of the mercers of 
London ten years earlier (Hot. Pari. iii. 225). The oldest English 
instrument produced by Eymer is dated 1368 (vii. 526) ; but an 
indenture in the same idiom betwixt the abbot and convent of 
Whitby, and Eobert the son of John Bustard, dated at York in 
1343,1 is the earliest known. "J 



Ee-emergence of the English as a Literaey Tongue. 

French metrical romances and other poetry, accordingly, con- 
tinued to be written in England, and in many instances by 
Englishmen, throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 
Down to the end of the twelfth century verse was probably 
the only form in which romances, meaning originally any com- 
positions in the Romance or French language, then any narrative 
compositions whatever, were written : in the thirteenth, a few 
may have appeared in prose ; but before the close of the 
fourteenth prose had become the usual form in which such 
works were produced, and many of the old metrical romances 
had been recast in this new shape. The early French prose 
romances, however, do not, like their metrical predecessoi^, 
belong in any sense to the literature of this country : many of 
them were no doubt generally read for a time in England as well 
as in France ; but we have no reason for belieAnng that any of 
them were primarily addressed to the English public, or were 
wi'itten in England or by English subjects, and even during the 
brief space that they continued popular they seem to have been 
regarded as foreign importations. 

For the last fifty years of the fourteenth century, however, the 
French language had been rapidly losing the position it had 
held among us from the middle of the eleventh, and becoming 
among all classes in England a foreign tongue. To the testi- 

* " Kobert de Graystanes, Anglia Sacra, i. 761—' Take it as said ! By 
St. Lewis, lie was not very civil who wrote this word here.' " 

t " Charlton's History of Whitby, 247." 

X Dissertation on Eomance and Minstrelsy, pp. Lsxv.-lxxxvi. We have not 
thought it necessary to preserve Eitson's peculiar spelling, adopted, apparently, 
on no principle except that of deviating from the established usage. 



EE-EMERGENCE OF ENGLISH. 83 

monies above produced of Higden writing immediately before 
the commencement of this cbange, and of Trevisa after it bad 
been going on for about a quarter of a century, may be added 
what Chaucer writes, probably within ten years after the date 
(1385) which Trevisa expressly notes as that of his statement. 
In the Prologue to his Testament of Love, a prose work, which 
seems to have been far advanced, if not finished, in 1392* the 
great father of our English poetry, speaking of those of his 
countrymen who still persisted in writing French verse, ex- 
presses himself thus : — " Certes there ben some that speke thyr 
poysy mater in Frenche, of whyche speche the Frenche men 
have as good a fantasye as we have in hearing of French mennes 
Englyshe." And afterwards he adds, " Let, then, clerkes 
endyten in Latyn, for they have the propertye in science and the 
knowinge in that facultye, and lette Frenchmen in theyr 
Frenche also endyte theyr queynt termes, for it is kyndly 
[natural] to theyr mouthes ; and let us shewe our fantasyes in 
suche wordes as we leameden of our dames tonge." French, it 
is evident from this, although it might still be a common acquire- 
ment among the higher classes, had ceased to be the mother- 
tongue of any class of Englishmen, and was only known to those 
to whom it was taught by a master. So, the Prioress in the 
Canterbury Tales, although she could speak French " ful fayre 
and fetisly," or neatly, spoke it only 

" After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, 
For Frenche of Paris was to hire [lierj unknowe."t 

From this, as from many other passages in old writers, we learn 
that the French taught and spoken in England had, as was indeed 
inevitable, become a corrupt dialect of the language, or at least 
very different from the French at Paris. But, as the foreign 

* See Tyrwliitt's Account of the Works of Chaucer, prefixed to his 
Glossary. 

t It is impossible to believe with Sir Harris Nicolas, in his otherwise very 
elcar and judicious Life of Chaucer (8vo. Lond. 1843 ; additional note, p. 142), 
that Chaucer perhaps here meant to intimate that the prioress could not 
speak French at all, on the ground that the expression "French of Stratford- 
at-Bow" is used in a tract publislied in 1586 (Feme's Blazon of Gentrie), to 
describe the language of English heraldry. In the first place the phrase is not 
there " a colloquial paraphrase for English," but for the mixed French and 
English, or, as it might be regarded, Anglicized or corrupted French, of our 
heralds. But, at any rate, can it be supposed for a moment that Chaucer 
would take so roundabout and fantastic a way as this of telling his readers 
so simple a fact, as that his prioress could speak her native tongue ? He 
would never have spent three words upon such a matterj much less three 
lines. 



84 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tongue lost its hold and declined in pnrity, the old Teutonic 
speech of the native population, favoured by the same circum- 
stances and course of events which checked and depressed its 
rival, and having at last, after going through a process almost 
of dissolution and putrefaction, begun to assume a new organiza- 
tion, gradually recovered its ascendancy. 

We have already examined the first revolution which the 
language underwent, and endeavoured to explain the manner in 
which it was brought about. It consisted in the disintegration 
of the grammatical system of the language, and the conversion of 
it from an inflectional and synthetic into a comparatively non- 
inflected and analytic language. The vocabulary, or what we 
may call the substance of the language, was not changed ; that 
remained still purely Gothic, as it always had been ; only the 
old form or structure was broken up or obliterated. There was 
no mixture or infusion of any foreign element ; the language 
was as it were decomposed, but was not adulterated, and the 
process of decomposition may be regarded as having been mainly 
the work of the eleventh century, and as having been begun by 
the Danish Conquest and consummated by the Norman. 

This first revolution which the language underwent is to be 
carefully distinguished from the second, which was brought 
about by the combination of the native with a foreign element, 
and consisted essentially in the change made in the vocabulary 
of the language by the introduction of numerous terms borrowed 
from the French. Of this latter innovation we find little trace 
till long after the completion of the former. For nearly two 
centuries after the Conquest the English seems to Lave been 
spoken and written (to the small extent to which it was written) 
with scarcely any intermixture of Norman. It only, in fact, 
began to receive such intermixture after it came to be adopted as 
the speech of that part of the nation which had previously 
spoken French. And this adoption was plainly the cause of the 
intermixture. So long as it remained the language only of those 
who had been accustomed to speak it from their infancy, and 
who had never known any other, it might have gradually become 
changed in its internal organization, but it could scarcely acquire 
any additions from a foreign source. What should have tempted 
the Saxon peasant to substitute a Norman term, upon any occa- 
sion, for the word of the same meaning with v;'hich the language 
of his ancestors supplied him ? As for things and occasions for 
which new names were necessary, they must have come com- 
paratively little in his way ; and, when they did, the capabilities 
of his native tongue were sufficient to furnish him with appro- 



SECOND ENGLISH. 85 

priate forms of expression from its own resources. Tlie corrup- 
tion of tlie English by the intermixture of French vocables mnst 
have proceeded from those whose original language was French, 
and who were in habits of constant intercourse with Frencjh 
customs, French literature, and everything else that was French, 
at the same time that they, occasionally at least, spoke English. 
And this supposition is in perfect accordance with the historical 
fact. So long as the English was the language of only a part of 
the nation, and the French, as it were, struggled with it for 
mastery, it remained unadulterated ; — when it became the speech 
of the whole people, of the higher classes as well as of the lower, 
then it lost its old Teutonic purity, and received a larger alien 
admixture from the alien lips through which it passed. Whether 
this was a fortunate circumstance, or the reverse, is another 
question. It may just be remarked, however, that the English, , 
if it had been left to its own spontaneous and unassisted deve- 
lopment, would probably have assumed a character resembling 
rather that of the Dutch or the Flemish than that of the German 
of the present day. 

The commencement of this second revolution, which changed 
the very substance of the language, may most probably be dated 
from about the middle of the thirteenth century, or about a 
century and a half after the completion of the first, which affected, 
not the substance or vocabulary of the language, but only its 
form or grammatical system. 



Second English : — 
commonly called semi-saxon. 

; The chief remains that we have of English verse for the first 
two centuries after the Conquest have been enumerated by Sir 
Frederic Madden in a comprehensive paragraph of his valuable 
Introduction to the romance of Havelock, which we will take 
leave to transcribe : — " The notices by which we are enabled to 
trace the rise of our Saxon poetry from the Saxon period to the 
end of the twelfth century are few and scanty. We may, indeed, 
comprise them all in the Song of Canute recorded by the monk 
of Ely [Hist. Elyens. p. 505 apud Gale], who wrote about 1166 ; 
the words put into the mouth of Aldred archbishop of York, 
who died in 1069 [W. Malmesb. de Gest. Pontif. 1. i. p. 271] ; 
the verses ascribed to St. Godric, the heimit of Finchale, who 
died in 1170 [Eits. Bibliogr. Poet.]; the few lines preserved by 
Lambarde and Camden attributed to the same period [Kits. Anc. 
Songs, Diss. p. xxviii.] ; and the prophecy said to have been set up 



86 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

at Here in tlie year 1189, as recorded by Benedict Abbas, 'Roger 
Hoveden, and the Chronicle of Lanercost [Eits. Metr. Rom. Diss, 
p. Ixxiii.]. To the same reign of Henry II. are to be assigned 
the metrical compositions of Layamon [MS. Cott. Cal. A. ix., and 
Otho C. xiii.] and Orm [MS. Jun. 1], and also the legends of St. 
Katherine, St. Margaret, and St. Jnlian [MS. Bodl. 34], with 
some few others, from which we may learn with tolerable 
accuracy the state of the language at that time, and its gradual 
formation from the Saxon to the shape it subsequently assumed. 
From this period to the middle of the next century nothing 
occurs to which we can affix any certain date ; but we shall pro- 
bably not err in ascribing to that interval the poems ascribed to 
John de Guldevorde [MSS. Cott. Cal. A. ix., Jes. Coll. Oxon. 29], 
the Biblical History [MS. Bennet Cant. R. 11] and Poetical 
Paraphrase of the Psalms [MSS. Cott. Vesp. D. vii., Coll. Benn. 
Cant. 0. 6, Bodl. 921] quoted by Warton, and the Moral Ode 
published by Hickes [MSS. Digby 4, Jes. Coll. Oxon. 29]. 
Between the years 1244 and 1258, we know, was written the 
versification of part of a meditation of St. Augustine, as proved 
by the age of the prior who gave the MS. to the Durham Library 
[MS. Eccl. Dun. A. iii. 12, and Bodl. 42]. Soon after this time 
also were composed the earlier Songs in Ritson and Percy (1264), 
with a few more pieces which it is unnecessary to particularize. 
This will bring us to the close of Henry III.'s reign and begin- 
ning of his successor's, the period assigned by our poetical 
antiquaries to the romances of Sir Tristrem, Kyng Horn, and 
Kyng Alesaunder." * 

The verse that has been preserved of the song composed by 
Canute as he was one day rowing on the Nen, while the holy 
music came floating on the air and along the water from the choir 
of the neighbouring minster of Ely — a song which we are told 
by tho historian continued to his day, after the lapse of a 
century and a half, to be a universal popular favourite f — is very 
nearly such English as was written in the fourteenth century. 
This interesting fragment properly falls to be given as the first 
of our specimens : — 

Merle sungen the muneches binnen Ely 
Tha Cnut Ching rew there by : 
Iioweth, cnihtes, noer the lant, 
And here we thes muneches saeng. 



* The Ancient English Eomance of Havelok the Dane ; Introduction, 
p. xlix. We have transferred the references, inclosed in brackets, from the 
bottom of the page to the text. _ 

t Qu^e usque hodie in choris publice cantantur, et in proverbiis memo- 
antur. 



ST. GODRiC. 87 

That is, literally, — 

Merry (sweetly) sung the monks within Ely 
That (when) Cnute King rowed thereby : 
Kow, knights, near the land, 
And hear we these monks' song. 

Being in verse and in rhyme, it is probable that the words are 
reported in their original form ; they cannot, at any rate, be much 
altered. 

The not very clerical address of Archbishop Aldred to Ursus 
Earl of Worcester, who refused to take down one of his castles 
the ditch of which encroached upon a monastic churchyard, con- 
sists, as reported by William of Malmesbury (who by-the-by 
praises its elegance) of only two short lines : — 

Hatest thou* Urse ? 
Have thou God's curse. 

The hymn of St. Godric has more of an antique character. It 
is thus given by Eitson, who professes to have collated the Royal 
MS. 5 F. vii., and the Harleian MS. 322, and refers also to Matt. 
Parisiensis Historia, pp. 119, 120, edit. 1640, and to (MS. Cott.) 
Nero D. v : — 

Sainte Marie [clane] virgine, 

Moder Jhesu Oristes Nazarene, 

On fo [or fong], schild, help thin Godric, 

On fang bring hegilich with the in Godes riche. 

Sainte Marie, Christe's bur, 

Maidens clenhad, moderes flur, 

Dilie min sinne [or sennen], rix in min mod, 

Bring me to winne with the selfd God. 

"By the assistance of the Latin versions," adds Eitson, "one 
IS enabled to give it literally in English, as follows : — Saint 
Mary [chastej virgin, mother of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, take, 
shield, help thy Godric ; take, bring him quickly with thee 
into God's kingdom. Saint Mary, Christ's chamber, purity of a 
maiden, flower of a mother, destroy my sin, reign in my mind, 
bring me to dwell with the only God." 

Two other short compositions of the same poetical eremite are 
much in the same style. One is a couplet said to have been sung 
to him by the spirit or ghost of his sister, who appeared to him 
after her death and thus assured him of her happiness : — 

* That is, Hightest thou (art thou called) ? Malmesbury's Latin translation 
is, " Vocaris Ursus : habeas Dei maledictionem." But the first line seems to 
be interrogative. 



88 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Crist and Sainte Marie swa on scamel me iledde 

That ic on this erde ne silde with mine bare fote itredde. 

Which Eitson translates : — " Christ and Mary, thus supported, 
have me brought, that I on earth should not with my bare foot 
tread." 

The other is a hymn to St.- Nicholas : — 

Sainte Nicholaes, Godes druth, 

Tymbre us faire scone hus. 

At thi burth, at thi bare, 

Sainte Nicholaes, bring us wel there. 

" That is," says Eitson, " Saint Nicholas, God's lover, build us a 
fair beautiful house. At thy birth, at thy bier, Saint Nicholas, 
bring us safely thither." 

As for the rhymes given by Lambarde and Camden as of the 
twelfth century, they can hardly in the shape in which we have 
them be of anything like that antiquity : they are, in fact, in 
the common English of the sixteenth century. Lambarde (in 
his Dictionary of England, p. 36) tells us that a rabble of Flem- 
ings and Normans brought over in 1173 by Eobert Earl of 
Leicester, when they were assembled on a heath near St. 
Edmonds Bury, " fell to dance and sing, 

Hoppe Wylikin, hoppe Wyllykin, 
Ingland is thyne and myne, &c." 

Camden's story is that Hugh Bigott, Earl of Norfolk, in the 
reign of Stephen used to boast of the impregnable strength of his 
castle of Bungey after this fashion : — 

" Were I in my castle of Bunge}^, 
Upon the river of Waveney"^ 
I would ne care for the king of Cockeney." 

What Sir Frederick Madden describes as " the prophecy said 
to have been set up at Here in the year 1189 " is given by Eitson 
as follows : — 

Whan thu sees in Here hert yreret, 

Than snlen Engles in three be ydelet : 

That an into Yriand al to late waie. 

That other into Piiille mid prude bileve. 

The thridde into Airhahen herd all wreken drechegen. 

These lines, which he calls a "specimen of English poetry, 
apparently of the same age " (the latter part of the 12th century), 
Eitson says are preserved by Benedictus Abbas, by Hoveden, and 
by the Chronicle of Lanercost ; and he professes to give them. 



THE BRUT OF LAYAMOX, 89 

and the account by which they are introduced, from "the 
fo liner," by which he means the first of the tlu'ee. But in truth 
the verses do not occur as he has printed them in any of the 
places to which he refers. And there is no ground for supposing, 
thet they were ever inscribed or set up upon any house at 
"Here" or elsewhere. AYhat is said both by Benedict and 
Hoveden (who employ nearly the same words) is simply that 
the figTU'e of a hart was set upon the pinnacle of the house, in 
order, as was believed, that the prophecy contained in the verses 
might be accomplished — which prophecy, we are told im- 
mediately before, had been found engraven in ancient charac- 
ters upon stone tables in the neighbourhood of the place. It is 
clearly intended to be stated that the prophecy was much older 
than the building of the house, and the erection of the figure of 
a stag, in the year 1190. 



The Brut of LAYAiiox. 



Layamon, or, as he is also called, Laweman — for the old cha- 
racter represented in this instance by our modern y is really 
only a guttural (and by no means either a j or a z^ by which it 
is sometimes rendered) — tells us himself that he was a priest, 
and that he resided at Ernley, near Eadstone, or Eedstone, 
which appears to have been what is now called Arley Eegis, or 
Lower Arley, on the western bank of the Severn, in Worcester- 
shire. He seems to say that he was employed in the services of 
the church at that place: — " ther he bock radde " (there he 
book read). And the only additional information that he gives 
us respecting himself is, that his father's name was Leovenath. 
(or Leuca, as it is given in the later of the two texts). 

His Brut, or Chi'onicle of Britain (fi'om the arrival of Brutus 
to the death of King Cadwalader in a.d. 689), is in the main, 
though with many additions, a translation of the French Brut 
d'Angieterre of ^Vace, which is itself, as has been stated above, 
a translation, also with considerable additions from other 
sources, of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin Historia Britonum, 
which again professes, and probably with truth, to be trans- 
lated from a Welsh or Breton original. So that the genealogy 
of the four versions or forms of the narrative is ; — first, a Celtic 
original, believed to be now lost; secondly, the Latin of 
Geoftrey of Monmouth ; thirdly, the French of Wace : fourthly, 
the English of Layamon. The Celtic or British version is of 
unknown date ; the Latin is of the earlier, the French of the 



90 



ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 



latter, lialf of the twelfth century ; and that of Layamon would" 
appear to have been completed in the first years of the thirteenth. 
We shall encounter a second English translation from Wace's 
French before the middle of the fourteenth. 

The existence of Layamon's Chronicle had long been known, 
but it had attracted very little attention till comparatively recent 
times. It is merely mentioned even by Warton and Tyrwhitt — 
the latter only remarking (in his Essay on the Language and 
Versification of Chaucer), that, "though the greatest part of 
this work of Layamon resembles the old Saxon poetry, without 
rhyme or metre, yet he often intermixes a number of short 
verses of unequal lengths, but rhyming together pretty exactly, 
and in some places he has imitated not unsuccessfully the regular 
octosyllabic measure of his French original." George Ellis, in 
his Specimens of the Earty English Poets, originally pub- 
lished in 1790, was, we believe, the first to introduce Layamon 
to the general reader, by giving an extract of considerable 
length, with explanatory annotations, from what he described 
as his " very curious work," which, he added, never had been, 
and probably never would be, printed. Subsequently another 
considerable specimen, in every way much more carefully and 
learnedly edited, and accompanied with a literal translation 
throughout into the modern idiom, was presented by Mr. Guest 
in his History of English Ehythms, 1838 (ii. 113-123). But 
now the whole work has been edited by Sir Frederic Madden, 
for the Society of Antiquaries of London, in three volumes Svo. 
1847. This splendid publication, besides a Literal Translation, 
Notes, and a Grammatical Glossary, contains the Brat in two 
texts, separated from each other by an interval apparently of 
about half a century, and, whether regarded in reference to 
the philological, to say nothing of the historical, value and 
importance of Layamon's work, or to the admirable and alto- 
gether satisfactory manner in which the old chronicle is ex- 
hibited and illustrated, may fairly be characterized as by far 
the most acceptable present that has been made to the students 
of early English literature in our day. 

His editor conceives that we may safely assume Layamon's 
English to be that of North Worcestershire, the district in which 
he lived and wrote. But this western dialect, he contends, was 
also that of the southern part of the island, having in fact 
originated to the south of the Thames, whence, he says, it 
gradually extended itself " as far as the courses of the Severn, 
the Wye, the Tame, and the x\von, and more or less pervaded 
the counties of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, 



THE BRUT OF LAYAMON. 91 

Warwickshire, and Oxfordshire," — besides prevailing "through- 
out the channel counties from east to west," — notwithstanding 
that several of the counties that have been named, and that of 
Worcester especially, had belonged especially to the non-Saxon 
kingdom of Mercia. " The language of Layamon," he farther 
holds, " belongs to that transition period in which the ground- 
work of Anglo-Saxon phraseology and grammar still existed, 
although gradually yielding to the influence of the popular 
forms of speech. We find in it, as in the later portion of the 
Saxon Chronicle, marked indications of a tendency to adopt 
those terminations and sounds which characterise a language 
in a state of change, and which are apparent also in some other 
branches of the Teutonic tongue." As showing " the progress 
made in the course of two centuries in departing from the 
ancient, and purer grammatical forms, as found in Anglo-Saxon 
manuscripts," he mentions " the use of a as an article ; — the 
change of the Anglo-Saxon terminations a and an into e and en, 
as well as the disregard of inflexions and genders ; — the mas- 
culine forms given to neuter nouns in the plural ; — the neglect 
of the feminine terminations of adjectives and pronouns, and 
confusion between the definite and indefinite declensions ; the 
introduction of the preposition to before infinitives, and occa- 
sional use of weak preterites of verbs and participles instead of 
strong ; — the constant occurrence of en for on in the plurals of 
verbs, and frequent elision of the final e ; — together with the 
uncertainty in the rule for the government of prepositions." 
In the earlier text one of the most striking peculiarities is 
what has been termed the nunnation, defined by Sir Frederic 
as " consisting of the addition of a final n to certain cases of 
nouns and adjectives, to some tenses of verbs, and to several 
other parts of speech." The western dialect, of which both 
texts, and especially the earlier, exhibit strong marks, is further 
described as perceptible in the " termination of the present tense 
plural in th, and infinitives in i, ie, or y ; the forms of the plural 
personal pronouns, heo, heore, heom ; the frequent occurrence of 
the prefix i before past participles ; the use of v for /; and pre- 
valence of the vowel u for i or y, in such words as dude, hudde, 
hulle, putte, /mre, &c." "But," it is added, "on comparing the 
two texts carefully together, some remarkable variations are 
apparent in the later, which seem to arise, not from its having 
been composed at a more recent period, but from the infusion 
of an Anglian or Northern element into the dialect." From 
these indications the learned editor is disposed to think that 
the later text " may have been composed or transcribed in one 



92 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

of the counties conterminous to the Anglian border, and lie 
suggests that "perhaps we might fix on the eastern side of 
Leicestershire as the locality." 

One thing in the English of Layamon that is eminently de- 
serving of notice with reference to the history of the language 
is the very small amount of the French or Latin element that is 
found in it. " The fact itself," Sir F. Madden observes, " of a 
translation of Wace's poem by a priest of one of the midland 
counties is sufficient evidence how widely the knowledge of the 
writings of the trouveres was dispersed, and it would appear a 
natural consequence, that not only the outward form of the 
Anglo-Norman versification, but also that many of the terms 
used in the original would be borrowed. This, however, is 
but true in a very trifling degree, compared with the extent of 
the work ; for, if we number the words derived from the French 
(even including some that may have come directly from the 
Latin), we do not find in the earlier text of Layamon's poem so 
many as fifty, several of which were in usage, as appears by the 
Saxon Chronicle, previous to the middle of the twelfth century. 
Of this number the later text retains about thirty, and adds to 
them rather more than forty which are not found in the earlier 
version ; so that, if we reckon ninetj^ words of French origin in 
both texts, containing together more than 56,800 lines, we shall 
be able to form a tolerably correct estimate how little the Eng- 
lish language was really affected by foreign converse, even as 
late as the middle of the thirteenth century."* 

Layamon's poem extends to nearly 32,250 lines, or more than 
double the length of Wace's Brut. This may indicate the 
amount of the additions which the English chronicler has 
made to his French original. That, however, is only one, 
though the chief, of several preceding works to which he 
professes himself to have been indebted. His own account 
is: — 

He nom tha Englisca hoc 
Tha makede Seint Beda ; 
An other he nom on Latin, 
Tha makede Seinte Albin, 
And the feire Austin, 
1'he fulluht broute hider in. ' 
Boc he nom the thridde, 
Leide ther amidden, 



* Preface xxiii. 



THE BRUT OF LAYAMON. 93 

Tha makede a Frenchis clerc, 

Wace was ihoten, 

The wel conthe writen, 

And be hoe yef thare aethelen 

Aelienor, the wes Henries quene, 

Thes heyes kinges. 

Layamon leide theos hoc, 

And tha leaf wende. 

He heom leofliche bi-heold 

Lithe him beo Drihten. 

Fetheren he nom mid fingren, 

And fiede on boc-felle, 

And tha sothe word 

Sette to-gathere, 

And tha thre boc 

Thrumde to ane. 

That is, HteraHy : — 

He took the English book 

That Saint Bede made ; 

Another he took in Latin, 

That Saint Albin made, 

And the fair Austin, 

That baptism brought hither in. 

The third book he took, 

[And] laid there in midst. 

That rnade a French clerk, 

Wace was Qie] called, 

That well could write. 

And he it gave to the noble 

Eleanor, that was Henry's queen, 

The high king's. 

Layamon laid [before him] these books, 

And the leaves turned. 

He them lovingly beheld ; 

Merciful to him be [the] Lord. 

Feather (pen) he took with fingers, 

And wrote on book-skin, 

And the true words 

Set together. 

And the three books 

Compressed into one. 

His Englisli book was no doubt the translation into the ver- 
nacular tongue, commonly attributed to King Alfred, of Bede's 
Ecclesiastical History, which Layamon does not seem to have 
known to have been originally written in Latin. What he says 
about his Latin book is unintelligible. St. Austin died in 



94 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

A.D. 604 ; and tlie only Albin of wliom anything is known was 
Albin abbot of St. Austin's at Canterbury, who is mentioned by 
Bede as one of the persons to whom be M^as indebted for assist- 
ance in the compilation of bis History ; bnt he lived more than 
a century after St. Austin (or Augustine). Some Latin chronicle, 
however, Layamon evidently had; and his scholarship, there- 
fore, extended to an acquaintance with two other tongues in 
addition to the now obsolete classic form of his ov>ti. 

The principal, and indeed almost the only, passage in Laya- 
mon's poem from which any inference can be drawn as to the 
precise time when it was written, is one near the end (p. 31, 
979-80) in which, speaking of the tax called Eome-feoh, Eome- 
scot, or Peter-pence, he seems to express a doubt whether it will 
much longer continue to be paid — 

Drilite wat hu loiige 
Theo lagen sciiUen ilaeste 
(The Lord knows how long 
The law shall last). 

This his learned editor conceives to allude to a resistance which 
it appears was made to the collection of the tax by King John 
and the nobility in the year 1205 ; and that supposition, he 
further suggests, may be held to be fortified by the manner in 
which Queen Eleanor, who had retired to Aquitaine on the 
accession of John, and died abroad at an advanced age in 1204, 
is spoken of in the passage quoted above from what we may call 
the Preface, written, no doubt, after the work was finished — 
" Aelienor, the wes Henries queue." 

" The structure of Layamon's poem," Sir Frederic observes, 
" consists partly of lines in which the alliterative system of the 
Anglo-Saxons is preserved, and partly of couplets of unequal 
length rhiming together. Many couplets, indeed, occur which 
have both of these forms, whilst others are often met with which 
possess neither. The latter, therefore, must have depended 
wholly on accentuation, or have been corrupted in transcription. 
The relative proportion of each of these forms is not to be ascer- 
tained without extreme difficulty, since the author uses them 
everywhere intermixed, and slides from alliteration to rhime, or 
from rhime to alliteration, in a manner perfectly arbitrary. The 
alliterative portion, however, predominates on the whole greatly 
over the lines rhiming together, even including the imperfect or 
assonant terminations, which are very frequent." Mr. Guest, 
Sir Frederic notes, has shown by the specimen which he has 
given with the accents marked in his English Ehythms (ii. 114- 



THE ORMULUM.- 95 

124j, " tliat tlie rhiming couplets of Layamon are founded on tlie 
models of accentuated Anglo-Saxon rhythms of four, five, six, or 
seven accents." 

Layamon's poetical merit, and also his value as an original 
authority, are rated rather high by his editor. His additions to 
and amplifications of Wace, we are told, consist in the earlier 
part of the work " principally of the speeches placed in the 
mouths of difi"erent personages, which are often gi^^en with quite 
a dramatic effect." " The text of Wace," it is added, " is enlarged 
throughout, and in many passages to such an extent, particularly 
after the birth of Arthur, that one line is dilated into twenty ; 
names of persons and localities are constantly supplied, and not 
unfrequently interpolations occur of entirel}'- new matter, to the 
extent of more than an hundred lines. Layamon often embel- 
lishes and improves on his copy; and the meagre nariative of 
the French poet is heightened by graphic touches and details, 
which give him a just claim to be considered, not as a mere 
translator, but as an original writer." 



The Ormulum. 

Another metrical work of considerable extent, that known as 
the Ormulum, from Orm, or Ormin, which appears to have been 
the name of the writer, has been usually assigned to the same, or 
nearly the same age with the Brut of Layamon. It exists only 
in a single manuscript, which there is some reason for believing 
to be the author's autograph, now preserved in the Bodleian 
Library among the books bequeathed by the great scholar 
Francis Junius, who appears to have purchased it at the Hague 
in 1659 at the sale of the books of his deceased friend Janus 
Ulitius, or Ylitius (van Vliet), also an eminent philologist and 
book-collector. It is a folio volume, consisting of 90 parchment 
leaves, besides 29 others inserted, upon which the poetry is 
written in double columns, in a stiff but distinct hand, and 
without division into verses, so that the work had always been 
assumed to be .in prose till its metrical character was pointed out 
by Tyrwhitt in his edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, 1775. 
Accordingly no mention is made of it by Warton, the first 
volume of whose History was published in 1774. But it had 
previously been referred to by Hickes and others ; and it has 
attracted a large share of the attention of all recent investigators 
of the history of the language. It has now been printed in full, 
under the title of The Ormulum; Now first edited from the 



96 ENGLISH LITEKATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Original Manuscript in tlie Bodleian, with. Notes and a glossary, 
by Eobert Meadows White, D.D., late Fellow of St. Mary 
Magdalene College, and formerly Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 
the University of Oxford ; 2 vols. 8vo. Oxford, at the University 
Press, 1852. 

The Ormulum is described by Dr. White as being " a series of 
Homilies, in an imperfect state, composed in metre without 
alliteration, and, except in very few cases, also without rhyme ; 
the subject of the Homilies being supplied by those portions of 
the New Testament which were read in the daily service of the 
Church." The plan of the writer is, we are further told, " first 
to give a paraphrastic version of the Gospel of the day, adapting 
the matter to the rules of his verse, with such verbal additions 
as were required for that purpose. He then adds an exposition 
of the subject in its doctrinal and practical bearings, in the 
treatment of which he borrows copiously from the writings of 
St. Augustine and ^Ifric, and occasionally from those of Beda." 
" Some idea," it is added, " may be formed of the extent of 
Ormin's labours when we consider that, out of the entire series 
of Homilies, provided for nearly the whole of the yearly service, 
nothing is left beyond the text of the thirty-second." We have 
still nearly ten thousand long lines of the work, or nearly 
twenty thousand as Dr. White prints them, with the fifteen 
syllables divided into two sections, the one of eight the other of 
seven syllables, — the latter, which terminates in an unaccented 
syllable, being prosodically equivalent to one of six, so that the 
whole is simply our still common alternation of the eight-syllabled 
and the six-syllabled line, only without either rhyme or even 
alliteration, which makes it as pure a species of blank verse, 
though a different species, as that which is now in use. 

The list of the texts, or subjects of the Homilies, as preserved 
in the manuscript, extends to 242, and it appears to be imper- 
fect. Ormin plainly claims to have completed his long self- 
imposed task. Here is the beginning of the Dedication to his 
brother Walter, which stands at the head of the work : — 

Nu, brotberr Wallterr, brotherr min 

[Now, brother Walter, brother mine] 
Affterr the flaeshes kinde ; 

[After the flesh's kind (or nature)] 
Annd brotherr min i Crisstenndom 

[And brother mine in Christendom (or Christ's kingdom)] 
Thurrh fulluhht and thurrh trowwthe • 

[Through baptism and through truth] 
Annd brotherr min i Godess bus, 

[And brother mine in God's house] 



THE ORMULUM. 97 

Yet the thride wise, 

[Yet on (in) the third wise] 
Thurrh thatt witt hafenn takenn ba 

[Though that we two liave taken bothj 
An reghellboc to folo-benn, 

[One rule-book to follow] 
Unnderr kammnkess bad and lif, 

[Under canonic's (canon's) rank and life] 
Swa summ Sannt Awwstin sette ; 

[So as St. Austin set (or ruled)] 
Ice bafe don swa summ tbu badd 

[I have done so as thou bade] 
Annd fortbedd te tbin wille ; 

[And performed thee thine will (wish)] 
Ice bafe wennd inntill Enngiissb 

[I have wended (turned) into English] 
Goddspelless ballgbe lare, 

[Gospel's holy lore] 
Affterr tbatt little witt tatt me 

[After that little wit that me] 
Min Dribbtin bafetbtb lenedd. 

[My Lord hath lent] 

One remarkable feature in this English is evidently some- 
tb.ing very peculiar in the spelling. And the same system 
is obsei-ved throughout the work. It is found on a slight 
examination to consist in the duplication of the consonant 
whenever it follows a vowel having any other than the sound 
which is now for the most part indicated by the annexation of a 
silent e to the single consonant, or what may be called the name 
sound, being that by which the vowel is commonly named or 
spoken of in our modem English. Thus pane would by Ormin 
be written pan, huipan pann ; mean men, but m£n menn ; pine pin, 
hut pin pinn; own on, but on onn ; tune tun, but tun tunn. This, as 
Mr. Guest has pointed out, is, after all, only a rigorous carrying 
out of a principle which has always been applied to a certain 
extent in English orthography, — as in tally, or tall, herry, witty, 
folly, dull, as compared with tale, heer, white, lone, mule. The effect, 
however, in Ormin's work is on a hasty inspection to make his 
English seem much more rude and antique than it really is. The 
entry of the MS. in the catalogue of Vliet's library, as quoted 
by Dr. White, describes it as an old Swedish or Gothic book. 
Other early notices speak of it as semi-Saxon, or half Danish, or 
possibly old Scottish. Even Hickes appears to have regarded it 
as belonging to the first age after the Conquest. 

Ormin attaches the highest importance to his peculiar system 
of orthography. Nevertheless, in quoting what he says upon 



98 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

the subject in a subsequent passage of bis Dedication we 
will take the liberty, for the sake of giving a clear and just idea 
of his language to a reader of the present day, to strip it of a 
disguise which so greatly exaggerates its apparent antiquity : — 

And whase willen shall this book 

[And whoso shall wish this book] 
Eft other sithe writen, 

[After (wards) (an) other time (to) write] 
Him bidde ice that he't write right, 

[Him bid I that he it write rightj 
Swa sum this book him teacheth, 

[So as this book him teacheth] 
All thwert out after that it is 

[All athwart (or through) out after that (or what) it is] 
Upo this firste bisne, 

[Upon this first example] 
With all suilk rime als here is set 

[With all such rhyme as here is set] 
With all se fele wordes 

[With all so many words] 
And tat he looke well that he 

[And that he look well that he] 
An bookstaff write twies 

[A letter wi'ite twice] 
Ey where there it upo this book 

[Wherever there (or where) it upon this book] 
Is written o that wise. 

[Is written on (or in) that wise] 
Looke he well that he't write sway 

[Look he well that he it write so] 
For he ne may nought elles 

[For he may not else] 
On English writen right te word, 

[On (or in) English write right the word] 
That wite he well to soothe. 

[That wot (or know) he well to (or for) sooth (or tiuth)] 

Thus presented, Ormin's English certainly seems to differ 
much less from that of the present day than Layamon's. His 
vocabulary may have as little in it of any foreign admixture ; 
but it appears to contain many fewer words that have now 
become obsolete ; and both his grammar and his construction 
have much more of a modern character and air. 

On the whole, it may be assumed that, while we have a dialect 
founded on that of the Saxons specially so called in Layamon, 
we have a specially Anglian form of the national language in the 
-Ormulum ; and perhaps that distinction will be enough, without 
supposing any considerable difference of date, to explain the 



THE ANCREN RIWLE. 99 

linguistic differences between the two. There is good reason for 
believing that the Anglian part of the country shook off the 
shackles of the old inflectional system sooner than the Saxon, 
and that our modern comparatively uninflected and analytic 
English was at least in its earliest stage more the product of 
Anglian than of purely Saxon influences, and is to be held as 
ha^'ing grown up rathei^ in the northern and north-eastern xoarts 
of the country than in the southern or south-western. 



The Ancren Eiwle. 



There is also to be mentioned, along with the Brut of Layamon 
and the Ormulum, a work of considerable extent in prose which 
has been assigned to the same interesting period in the history of 
the language, the Ancren Eiwle, that is, the Anchorites', or 
rather Anchoresses', Eule, being a treatise on the duties of the 
monastic life, written evidently by an ecclesiastic, and probably 
one in a position of eminence and authority, for the direction of 
three ladies to whom it is addressed, and who, with their domestic 
servants or lay sisters, appear to have formed the entire com- 
munity of a religious house situated at Tarente (otherwise called 
Tarrant-Kaines, Kaineston, or Kingston) in Dorsetshire. This 
work too has now been printed, having been edited for the 
Camden Society in 1853 by the Eev. James Morton, B.D. It is 
preserved in four manuscripts, three of them in the Cottonian 
Collection, the other belonging to Corpus Christi College, Cam- 
bridge ; and there is also in the Library of Magdalen Colleg-e, 
Oxford, a Latin text of the greater part of it. The entire work 
extends to eight Parts, or Books, which in the printed edition 
cover 215 quarto pages. Mr. Morton, who has appended to 
an apparently careful representation of the ancient text both a 
glossary and a version in the language of the present day, has 
clearly shown, in opposition to the commonly received opinitm, 
that the work was originally written in English, and that the 
Latin in so far as it goes is only a translation. This, indeed, 
might have been inferred as most probable in such a case, on the 
mere ground that we have here a clergyman, however learned, 
drawing up- a manual of practical religious instruction for 
readers of the other sex, even without the special proofs which^ 
Mr. Morton has brought forward. The conclusion to which he 
states himself to have come, after carefully examining and com- 
paring the text which he prints with the Oxford MS., is, that 
the Latin is " a translation, in many parts abridged and in some 



100 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

enlarged, made at a comparatively recent period, when the lan- 
guage in which the whole had been originally written was 
becoming obsolete." In many instances, in fact, the Latin trans- 
lator has misunderstood his original. Mr. Morton has also thrown 
great doubts upon the common belief that the authorship of the 
work is to be ascribed to a certain Simon de GandaYO, or Simon 
de Ghent, who died Bishop of Salisbury in 1315. This belief 
rests solely on the authority of an anonymous note prefixed to 
the Latin version of the work preserved in Magdalen College, 
Oxford ; and Mr. Morton conceives that Simon is of much too 
late a date. It might have been thought that the fact of the 
work having been written in English would of itself be con- 
clusive against his claim ; but the Bishop of Salisbury, it seems, 
was born in London or Westminster ; it was only his father who 
was a native of Flanders. On the whole, Mr. Morton is inclined 
to substitute in place of Bishop Simon a Eichard Poor, who 
was successively Bishop of Chichester, of Salisbury, and of 
Durham, and who was a native of Tarente, where also, it seems, 
he died in 1237. Of this prelate Matthew Paris speaks in very 
high terms of commendation. 

Two other mistakes in the old accounts are also disposed of: — 
that the three recluses to whom the work is addressed belonged 
to the monastic order of St. James, and that they were the 
sisters of the writer. He merely directs them, if any ignorant 
person should ask them of what order they were, to say that 
they were of the order of St. James, who in his canonical epistle 
has declared that pure religion consists in visiting and relieving 
the widow and the orphan, and in keeping ourselves unspotted 
from the world ; and in addressing them as his dear sisters, 
'' he only," as Mr. Morton explains, " uses the form of speech 
commonly adopted in convents, where nuns are usually spoken 
of as sisters or mothers, and monks as brothers or fathers." 

Upon what is the most important question relating to the 
work, regarded as a documentary monument belonging to the 
history of the language, the learned editor has scarcely succeeded 
in throwing so much light. Of the age of the manuscripts, or 
the character of the handwriting, not a word is said. It does 
not even appear whether any one of the copies can be supposed 
to be of the antiquity assumed for the work upon either the new 
or the old theory of its authorship. The question is left to rest 
entirely upon the language, which, it is remarked, is evidently 
that of the first quarter of the thirteenth century, not greatly 
diflering from that of Layamon, which has been clearly shown 
by Sir F. Madden to have been written not later than 1205. 



THE ANCREN RIWLE. 101 

The English, of the Ancren Eule is, indeed, rude enongh for the 
highest antiquity that can be demanded for it. " The spelling," 
Mr. Morton observes, " whether from carelessness or want of 
system, is of an uncommon and unsettled character, and may be 
pronounced barbarous and uncouth." The inflections v/hich 
originally marked the oblique cases of substantive nouns, and 
also the distinctions of gender, are, it is added, for the most part 
discarded. 

In one particular, however, the English of the Eule differs 
remarkably from Layamon's. In that, as we have seen, Sir F. 
Madden found in above 32,000 verses of the older text only 
about 50 words of French derivation, and only about 90 in ail in 
the 57,000 of both texts ; whereas in the present work the 
infusion of Norman words is described as large. But this, as 
Mr. Morton suggests, is " owing probably to the peculiar subjects 
treated of in it, which are theological and moral, in speaking of 
which terms derived from the Latin would readily occur to the 
mind of a learned ecclesiastic much conversant with that lan- 
guage, and with the works on similar subjects written in it." 

A few sentences from the Eighth or last Part, which treats of 
domestic matters, will afford a sufficient specimen of this curioiii^ 
work : — 

Ye ne schulen eten vleschs ne seim buten ine muchele secnesse ; other 
hwoso is euer feble eteth potage blithehche; and wunieth ou to Intel 
drunch. Notheleas, leoue snstren, ower mete and ower drunch haueth 
ithuht me lesse then ich wolde. Ne ueste ye nenne dei to bread and to 
watere, bute ye habben leaue. Sum ancre maketh hire bord mid hire 
gistes withuten. Thet is to mucbe ureondschipe, uor, of alle ordres 
theonne'-is bit unkuindelukest and mest ayean ancre ordre, thet is a] dead 
to the worlde. Me bauetb i-berd ofte siggen thet deade men speken mid 
cwike men ; auh thet heo eten mid cwike men ne uond ich neuer yet^e. 
Ne makie ye none gistninges ; ne ne tulle ye to tbe yete non unkutbe 
harloz ; tbauh tber nere non other vuel of [bit ?] bute bore metblease 
mutb, hit wolde otber liwule letten beouendlicbe tboubtes. 

[That is, literally : — Ye not shall eat flesh nor lard but in 
much sickness ; or whoso is ever feeble may eat potage blithely ; 
and accustom yourselves to little drink. Nevertheless, dear 
sisters, your meat and your drink have seemed to me less than I 
would (have it). Fast ye not no day to bread and to water but 
ye have leave. Some anchoresses make their board (or meals) 
with their friends without. That is too much friendship, for, of 
all orders, then is it most unnatural and most against anchoress 
order, that is all dead to the world. One has heard oft say that 
dead men speak with quick (living) men ; but that they eat with 



102 ENGLISH UTEFvATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

quick men not found I never yet. Make not ye no ban que tings, 
nor allure ye not to the gate no strange vagabonds; though 
there were not none other evil of it but their measureless mouth 
(or talk), it would (or might) other v^hile (sometimes) hinder 
heavenly thoughts.] 



Early English Metrical Eomances. 

From the thirteenth century also we are probably to date the 
origin or earliest composition of English metrical romances ; at 
least, none have descended to the present day which seem to 
have a claim to any higher antiquity. There is no absolutely 
conclusive evidence that all our old metrical romances are trans- 
lations from the French ; the French original cannot in every 
case be produced ; but it is at least extremely doubtful if any- 
such work was ever composed in English except upon the 
foundation of a similar French work. It is no objection that 
the subjects of most of these poems are not French or continental, 
but British — that the stories of some of them are purely English or 
Saxon : this, as has been shown, was the case with the early 
northern French poetry generally, from whatever cause, whether 
simply in consequence of the connection of Normandy with this 
country from the time of the Conquest, or partly from the 
earlier intercourse of the Normans with their neighbours the 
people of Armorica, or Bretagne, whose legends and traditions, 
which were common to them with their kindred the Welsh, have 
unquestionably served as the fountain-head to the most copious 
of all the streams of romantic fiction. French seems to have 
been the only language of popular literature (apart from mere 
songs and ballads) in England for some ages after the Conquest ; 
if even a native legend, therefore, was to be turned into a 
romance, it was in French that the poem would at that period 
be written. It is possible, indeed, that some legends might 
have escaped the French trouveurs, to be discovered and taken 
up at a later date by the English minstrels ; but this is not 
likely to have happened with any that were at all popular or 
generally known; and of this description, it is believed, are all 
those, without any exception, upon which our existing early 
English metrical romances are founded. The subjects of these 
compositions — Tristrem, King Horn, Havelok, &c. — could hardly 
have been missed by the French poets in the long period during 
which they had the whole field to themselves : we have the most 
conclusive evidence with regard to some of the legends in 
question that they were well known at an early date to the 



EARLY ENGLISH METRICAL ROMANCES. 103 

writers in tliat language ; — the story of Havelok, for instance, is 
in Gaimar's Chronicle ; — upon this general consideration alone, 
therefore, which is at least not contradicted by cither the interna] 
or historical evidence in any particular case, it seems reasonable 
to infer that, where we have both an English and a French 
metrical romance upon the same subject, the French is the 
earlier of the two, and the original of the other. From this it is, 
in the circumstances, scarcely a step to the conclusion come to by 
Tyrwhitt, who has intimated his belief " that we have no English 
romance prior to the age of Chaucer which is not a translation or 
imitation of some earlier French romance." * Certainly, if this 
judgment has not been absolutely demonstrated, it has not been 
refuted, by the more extended investigation the question has 
since received. 

The history of the English metrical romance appears shortly to 
be, that at least the first examples of it were translations from the 
French ; — that there is no evidence of any such having been pro- 
duced before the close of the twelfth century ; — that in the thir- 
teenth century were composed the earliest of those we now possess 
in their original form ; — that in the fourteenth the English took the 
place of the French metrical romance with all classes, and that 
this was the era alike of its highest ascendancy and of its most 
abundant and felicitous production ; — that in the fifteenth it was 
supplanted by another species of poetry among the more edu- 
cated classes, and had also to contend with another rival in the 
prose romance, but that, nevertheless, it still continued to be 
produced, although in less quantity and of an inferior fabric, — 
mostly, indeed, if not exclusively, by the mere modernization 
of older compositions — for the use of the common people ; — and 
that it did not altogether cease to be read and written till after 
the commencement of the sixteenth. From that time the taste 
for this earliest form of our poetical literature (at least counting 
from the Norman Conquest) lay asleep in the national heart till 
it was re-awakened in our own day by Scott, after the lapse 
of three hundred years. But the metrical romance was then 
become quite another sort of thing than it had been in its proper 
era, throughout the whole extent of which, while the story was 
generally laid in a past age, the manners and state of society 
described were, notwithstanding, in most respects those of the 
poet's and of his readers' or hearers' own time. This was 
strictly the case with the poems of this description which were 
produced in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries ; 
and even in those which were accommodated to the popular taste 
* Essay on the Language of Chaucer, note 55. 



104 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

of a later day mucli more than tlie language had to be partially 
modernized to preserve them in favoiir. When this could no 
longer be done without too much violence to the composition, or 
an entire destruction of its original character, the metrical romance 
lost its hold of the public mind, and was allowed to drop into 
oblivion. There had been very little of mere antiquarianism in 
the interest it had inspired for three centuries. It had pleased 
principally as a picture or reflection of manners, usages, and a 
general spirit of society still existing, or supposed to exist. And 
this is perhaps the condition upon which any poetry must ever 
expect to be extensively and permanently popular. We need not 
say that the temporary success of the metrical romance, as revived 
by Scott, was in great part owing to his appeal to quite a dif- 
ferent, almost an opposite, state of feeling. 



Metrical Chronicle of Egbert of Gloucester. 

Nearly what Biographj^ is to History are the metrical romances 
to the versified Chronicle of Eobert of Gloucester, a narrative of 
British and English affairs from the time of Brutus to the end of 
the reign of Henry III., which, from events to which it alludes, 
must have been written after 1297.* All that is known of the 
author is that he was a monk of the abbey of Gloucester. His 
Chronicle was printed— "faithfully, I dare say," says Tyrwhitt^ 
"but from incorrect manuscripts" — by Hearne, in 2 vols. 8vo., 
at Oxford, in 1724 ; and a re-impression of this edition was 
produced at London in 1810. The work in the earlier part of it 
may be considered a free translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 
Latin History ; but it is altogether a very rude and lifeless com- 
position. "This rhyming chronicle," says Warton, "is totally 
destitute of art or imagination. The author has clothed the 
fables of Geoffrey of Monmouth in rhyme, which have often a 
more poetical air in Geoffrey's prose." Tyrwhitt refers to 
Eobert of Gloucester in proof of the fact that the English 
language had already acquired a strong tincture of French ; 
Warton observes that the language of this writer is full of 
Saxonisms, and not more easy or intelligible than that of what he 
calls "the Norman Saxon poems" of Kyng Horn and others 
which he believes to belong to the preceding century. 

Eobert of Gloucester's Chronicle, as printed, is in long lines 
of fourteen syllables, which, however, are generally divisible 

* Tliis has been shown by Sir F. Madden in his Introduction to Haveloc the 
Dane, p. lii. 



ROBERT MANNYNG. 105 

into two of eight and six, and were perhaps intended to he 
so wiitten and read. The language appears to he marked hy 
the peculiarities of West Country English. Ample specimens 
are given by Warton and Ellis ; we shall not encumber our 
limited space with extracts which are recommended by no 
attraction either in the matter or manner. We will only 
transcribe, as a sample of the language at the commencement of 
the reign of Edward I., and for the sake of the curious evidence 
it supplies in confirmation of a fact to which we have more than 
once had occasion to draw attention, the short passage about the 
prevalence of the French tongue in England down even to this 
date, more than two centuries after the conquest : — 

" Thus come lo ! Engelonde into Normannes honde, 
And the Normans ne couthe speke tho bote her owe speche, 
And speke French as dude atom, and here chyldren dude al so teche, 
So that heymen of thys lond, that of her blod come, 

■ Holdeth alle thulke speche tliat hii of hem nome. 
Vor bote a man couthe French, me tolth of hym well lute : 
Ac lowe men holdeth to Englyss and to her kunde speche yut«. 
Ich wane ther be ne man in world contreyes none 
That ne holdeth to her kunde speche, but Engelond one. 
Ac wel me wot vor to conne bothe wel yt ys, 
Vor the more that a man con the more worth he ys." 

That is, literally : — Thus lo ! England came into the hand of 
the Normans : and the Normans could not speak then but their 
own speech, and spoke French as they did at home, and their 
children did all so teach ; so that high men of this land, that 
of their blood come, retain all the same speech that they of them 
took. For, unless a man know French, one talketh of him 
little. But low men hold to English, and to their natural speech 
yet. I imagine there be no people in any country of the world 
that do not hold to their natural speech, but in England alone. 
But well I wot it is well for to know both ; for the more that a 
man knows, the more worth he is. 

A short composition of Eobert of Gloucester's on the Martyrdom 
of Thomas a Beket was printed by the Percy Society in 1845. 



EOBEET MaNNYNG, OR De BrUKNE. 

Along with this chronicle may be mentioned the similar per- 
formance of Robert Mannyng, otherwise called Eobert de Brunne 
(from his birthplace,* Brunne, or Bourne, near Doping, or 

* See a valuable note on De Brunne in Sir Frederic Madden's Haveloc, 
Introduction, p. xiii. 



106 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Market Deeping, in Lincolnshire), belonging as it does to a date 
not quite half a century later. The work of Eobert de Brunne is 
in two parts, both translated from the French : the first, coming 
down to the death of Cadwalader, from ^Vace's Brut; the 
second, extending to the death of Edward I., from the French 
or Eomance chronicle written by Piers, or Peter, de Langtoft, 
a canon regular of St. Austin, at Bridlington, in Yorkshire, 
who wrote various works in French, and who appears to have 
lived at the same time with De Brunne. Langtoft, whose 
chronicle, though it has not been printed, is preserved in more 
than one manuscript, begins with Brutus ; but De Brunne, for 
sufficient reasons it is probable, preferred Wace for the earlier 
portion of the story, and only took to his own countrj^man and 
contemporary when deserted by his older Norman guide. It is 
the latter part of his work, however, which, owing to the subject, 
has been thought most valuable or interesting in modern times ; 
it has been printed by Hearne, under the title of Peter Langtoft's 
Chronicle (as illustrated and improved by Eobert of Brunne), 
from the death of Cadwalader to the end of K. Edward the First's 
reign ; transcribed, and now first published, from a MS. in the 
Inner Temple Library, 2 vols. 8vo. Oxford, 1725; [reprinted 
London, 1810.] This part, like the original French of Langtoft, is 
in Alexandrine verse of twelve syllables ; the earlier part, which 
remains in manuscript, is in the same octosyllabic verse in which 
its original, Wace's chronicle, is written. The work is stated in 
a Latin note at the end of the MS. to have been finished in 
1338. Eitson (Bibliographia Poetica, p. 33) is very wroth with 
Warton for describing De Brunne as having " scarcely more 
poetry than Eobert of Gloucester;" — "which only proves," 
Eitson says, " his want of taste or judgment." It may be 
admitted that De Brunne's chronicle exhibits the language in a 
considerably more advanced state than that of Gloucester, and 
also that he appears to have more natural fluency than his pre- 
decessor; his work also possesses greater interest from his 
occasionally speaking in his own person, and from his more 
frequent expansion and improvement of his French original by 
new matter ; but for poetry, it would probably require a " taste 
or judgment " equal to Eitson's own to detect much of it. 



Lawrence Minot. 



Putting aside the authors of some of the best of the early 
metrical romances, whose names are generally or universally 



LAWRENCE MINOT. 107 

unknown, perhaps the earliest writer of English verse subsequent 
to the Conquest who deserves the name of a poet is Lawrence 
Minot, who lived and wrote about the middle of the fourteenth 
century, and of the reign of Edward III. His ten poems in cele- 
bration of the battles and victories of that king, preserved in the 
Cotton MS. Galba E. ix., which the old catalogue had described 
as a manuscript of Chaucer, the compiler having been misled by 
the name of some former proprietor, Eichard Chawfer, inscribed 
on the volume, were discovered by Tyrwhitt while collecting 
materials for his edition of the Canterbury Tales, in a note to the 
Essay on the Language and Versification of Chaucer prefixed to 
which work their existence was first mentioned. This was in 1 775. 
In 1781 some specimens of them were given (out of their chro- 
nological place) by Warton in the third volume of his History of 
Poetry. Finally, in 1796, the whole were published by Eitson 
under the title of Poems written anno mccclii., by Lawrence Minot; 
with Introductory Dissertations on the Scottish Wars of Edward 
III., on his claim to the throne of France, and Notes and Glossary, 
8vo. London ; and a reprint of this volume appeared in 1825. 
Of the 250 pages, or thereby, of which it consists, only about 
50 are occupied by the poems, which are ten in number, their 
subjects being the Battle of Halidon Hill (fought 1333); the 
Battle of BannocKDurn (1314), or rather the manner in which 
that defeat, sustained by his father, had been avenged by 
Edward III.; Edward's first Invasion of France (1339); tli 
Sea-fight in the Swine, or Zwin* (1340) ; the siege of Tournay 
(the same year) ; the Landing of the English King at La 
Hogue, on his Expedition in 1346 ; the Siege of Calais (the 
same year) ; the Battle of Neville's Cross (the same year) ; 
the Sea-fight with the Spaniards off" Winchelsea (1350) ; and 
the Taking of the Guisnes (1352). It is from this last 
date that Eitson, somewhat unwarrantably, assumes that all 
the poems were written in that year. As they are very various 
in their form and manner, it is more probable that they were 
produced as the occasions of them arose, and therefore that they 
ought rather to be assigned to the interval between 1333 and 
1352. They are remarkable, if not for any poetical qualities of a 
high order, yet for a precision and selectness, as well as a force, 
of expression, previously, so far as is known, unexampled in 
English verse. There is a true martial tone and spirit too in 
them, which reminds us of the best of our old heroic ballads, 
while it is better sustained, and accompanied with more re- 
finement of style, than it usually is in these popular and anony- 
* To the south of the Isle of Cadsand, at the month of the West Scheldt. 



108 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

mous compositions. As a sample we will transcribe the one on 
Edward's first expedition to France, omitting a prologue, which 
is in a different measure, and modernizing the spelling where it 
does not affect the rhyme or rhythm : — 

Edward., owre comely king, 
In Braband has his wonmgi 

With many comely knight ; 
And in that land, truely to tell, 
Ordains he still for to dwell 

To time^ he think to fight. 

Now God, that is of mightes mast,^ 
Grant him grace of the Holy Ghast 

His heritage to win ; 
And Mary Moder, of mercy free. 
Save our king and his meny^ 

Fro sorrow, shame, and sin. 

Thus in Braband has he been, 
Where he before was seldom seen 

For to prove their japes f 
Now no langer will he spare, 
Bot unto France fast will he fare 

To comfort him with grapes. 

Furth he fared into France ; 
God save him fro mischance. 

And all his company ! 
The noble Duke of Brabknd 
With him went into that land, 

Keady to live or die. 

Then the rich flower de lice^ 
Wan there full little price ; 

Fast he fled for feared : 
The right heir of that countree 
Is comen/ with all his knightes free, 

To shake him by the beard. 

Sir Phihp the Valays« 
Wit his men in tho days 

To battle had he thought -.^ 
He bade his men them purvey 
Withouten langer delay ; 

But he ne held it nought. 



^ Dwelling. 2 Till the time. 3 ^og^ of might. 

4 Followers. * Jeers. 6 j^ieur de lis. 

■ Come. 8 Philip VI. de Valois, king of France. 

3 The meaning seems to be, " infoi-med his men in those days that he had 
a design to fight," Unless, indeed, vrit be a mistranscription of tcitli. 



LAWRENCE MINOT. 109 

He brouglit folk full great won/ 
Aye seven agains^ one, 

That full well weaponed were, 
Bot soon when he heard ascry^ 
That king Edward was near thereby. 

Then durst he nought come near. 

In that morning fell a mist, 

And when our Englishmen it wist, 

It changed all their cheer ; 
Our king unto God made his boon,* 
And God sent him good comfort soon ; 

The weader wex full clear. 

Our king and his men held the field 
Stalworthly with spear and shield. 

And thought to win his right ; 
With lordes and with knightes keen, 
And other doughty men bydeen* 

That war full freF to fight. 

When Sir Philip of France heard tell 
That king Edward in field wald^ dwell, 

Then gained him no glee :^ 
He traisted of no better boot,^ 
Bot both on horse and on foot 

He hasted him to flee. 

It seemed he was feared for strokes 
When he did fell his greate oaks 

Obout^'' his pavilioim ; 
Abated was then all his pride, 
For langer there durst he nought bide ; 

His boast was brought all down. 

The king of Berne" had cares cold, 
That was full hardy and bold 

A steed to umstride '.^^ 
He and the king als^^ of Naveine^^ 
War fair feared^^ in the fern 

Their hevids^^ for to hide. 



1 Number. ^ Against. 3 Report. 

^ Prayer, request. — Rits. Perhaps, rather, vow or hmid. 

^ Perhaps "besides." The word is of common occurrence, but of doubtful 
or various meaning. ^ Were full eager. 7 Would (was dwelling). 

8 The meaning seems to be, " then no glee, or joy, was given him " 
(accessit et). ^ He trusted in no better expedient, or alternative. 

' 10 About. " Bohemia. 12 Bestiide. i^ Also-. 

1* Navarre. i' Were fairly frightened. 16 Heads. 



110 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

And leves^ well it is no lie, 
And field hat^ Flemangr}^^ 

That king Edward was in, 
With princes that were stiff and bold, 
And dukes that were doughty told'* 

In battle to begin. 

The princes, that were rich on raw,^ 
Gerts nakers7 strike, and trumpes blaw, 

And made mirth at their might, 
Both alblast^ and many a bow 
War ready railed' upon a row, 

And Ml frek for to fight. 

Gladly they gave meat and drink. 
So that they suld the better swink,^*' 

The wight^^ men that there were. 
Sir Philip of France fled for doubt, 
And hied him hame with all his rout : 

Coward ! God Give him care ! 

For there then had the lily flower 
Lorn all halely^^ his honour, 

That so gat fled^^ for feard ; 
Bot our king Edward come full stilP^ 
When that he trowed no harm him till,^^ 

And keeped him in the beard.^^ 



Alliterative Verse. — Piers Ploughman. 

It may be obsei-ved that Minot's verses are tbiickly sprinkled 
with what is called alliteration^ or the repetition of words having 
the same commencing letter, either immediately after one another, 
or with the intervention only of one or two other words generally 
Tinemphatic or of subordinate importance. Alliteration, which 
we find here combined with rhyme, was in an earlier stage of 
our poetry employed, more systematically, as the substitute for 
that decoration — the recurrence, at certain regular intervals, of 
like beginnings, serving the same purpose which is now accom- 

^ Believe. 2 -yvas called. ^ The village of La Flamengrie. 

* Eeckoned. * Apparently, " arranged richly clad in a row." 

6 Caused. 7 Tjnubals. s Arblast, or crossbow. 

9 Placed. w Should the. better labour. 

^1 Stout. '2 Lost wholly. i3 Got put to flight? 

'■^ Came back quietly at his ease. 

1^ When he perceived there was no harm intended him. 
^6 Perhaps, "kept his beard untouched." 



ALLITERATIVE VERSE.— PIERS PLOUGHMAN. Ill 

plished by what Milton lias contemptuonslj called " tlie jingling 
sound of like endings." To the English of the period before the 
Conquest, until its very latest stage, rhyme was unknown, and 
down to the tenth century our verse appears to have been con- 
structed w^holly upon the principle of alliteration. Hence, 
naturally, even after we had borrowed the practice of rhyme 
from the French or Eomance writers, our poetry retained for a 
time more or less of its original habit. In Layamon, as we have 
seen, alliterative and rhyming couplets are intermixed ; in other 
cases, as in Minot, we have the rhyme only pretty liberally be- 
spangled with alliteration. At this date, in fact, the difficulty pro- 
bably would have been to avoid alliteration in writing verse ; all 
the old customary phraseologies of poetry had been moulded upon 
that principle ; and indeed alliterative expression has in every 
age, and in many other languages as well as our own, had a charm 
for the popular ear, so that it has always largely prevailed in 
proverbs and other such traditional forms of words, nor is it yet by 
any means altogether discarded as an occasional embellishment 
of composition, whether in verse or in prose. But there is one 
poetical work of the fourteenth century, of considerable extent, 
and in some respects of remarkable merit, in which the verse is 
without rhyme, and the system of alliteration is almost as regular 
as what we have in the poetry of the times before the Conquest. 
This is the famous Vision of Piers Ploughman, or, as the subject 
is expressed at fiill length in the Latin title, Visio Willielmi de 
Petro Ploughman, that is. The Vision of William concerning 
Piers or Peter Ploughman. The manuscripts of this poem, 
which long continued to enjoy a high popularity, are very 
numerous, and it has also been repeatedly printed : first in 
1550, at London, by Eobert Crowley, "dwelling in Elye rentes 
in Holburne," who appears to have produced three successive 
impressions of it in the same year; again in 1561, by Owen 
Eogers, " dwellyng neare unto great Saint Bartelmewes gate, at 
the sygne of the Spred Egle ;" next in 1813, under the super- 
intendence of the late Thomas Dunham Whitaker, LL.D. ; lastly, 
in 1842, under the care of Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., &c. 
Of the author of Piers Ploughman scarcely anything is 
known. He has commonly been called Eobert Langiand : but 
there are grounds for believing that his Christian name was 
William, and it is probable that it is himself of whom he speaks 
under that name throughout his work. He is supposed to have 
been a monk, and he seems to have resided in the West of Eng- 
land, near the- Malvern Hills, where he introduces himseK at 
the commencement of his poem as falling asleep " on a May 



112 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

morwenynge," and entering upon his dreams or visions. The 
date may be pretty nearly fixed. In one place there is an 
allusion to the treaty of Bretigny made with France in 1360, 
and to the military disasters of the previous year which led to 
it ; in another passage mention is made of a remarkable tempest 
which occurred on the 15th of January, 1362, as of a recent 
event. " It is probable," to quote Mr. Wright, " that the poem 
of Piers Ploughman was composed in the latter part of this year, 
when the effects of the great wind were fresh in people's me- 
mory, and when the treaty of Bretigny had become a subject of 
popular discontent."* We may assume, at least, that it was in 
hand at this tune. 

We cannot a.ttempt an analysis of the work. It consists, in 
Mr. W^ right's edition, where the long line of the other editions is 
divided into two, of 14,696 verses, distributed into twenty sec- 
tions, or Passus as they are called. Each passus forms, or pro- 
fesses to form, a separate vision ; and so inartificial or confused is 
the connection of the several parts of the composition (notwith- 
standing Dr. Whitaker's notion that it had in his edition " for 
the first time been shown that it was written after a regular and 
consistent plan"), that it may be regarded as being in reality not 
so much one poem as a succession of poems. The general sub- 
ject may be said to be the same with that of Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
Progress, the exposition of the impediments and temptations 
which beset the crusade of this our mortal life > and the method, 
too, like Bunyan's, is the allegorical ; but the spirit of the poetry 
is not so much picturesque, or even descriptive, as satirical. 
Vices and abuses of all sorts come in for their share of the ex- 
posure and invective ; but the main attack throughout is directed 
against the corruptions of the church, and the hypocrisy and 
worldliness, the ignorance, indolence, and sensuality, of the 
ecclesiastical order. To this favourite theme the author con-, 
stantly returns with new affection and sharper zest from any 
less high matter which he may occasionally take up. Hence 
it has been commonly assumed that he must have himself be- 
longed to the ecclesiastical profession, that he was probably a 
priest or monk. And his Vision has been regarded not only as 
mainly a religious poem, but as almost a puritanical and Protes- 
tant work, although produced nearly two centuries before either 
Protestanism or Puritanism was ever heard of. In this notion, 
as we have seen, it was brought into such repute at the time of 
the Eeformation that three editions of it were printed in one 
year. There is nothing, however, of anti-Eomanism, properly 
* Introduction, p. xii. 



PIEKS PLOUGHMAN. 313 

SO called, in Langiand, either doctrinal or constitutional ; and even 
the anti- clerical spirit of Ms poetry is not more decided than what 
is found in the wiitings of Chaucer, and the other popular litera- 
ture of the time. In all ages, indeed, it is the tendency of popular 
literature to erect itself into a power adverse to that of the priest- 
hood, as has been evinced more especially by the poetical litera- 
ture of modem Europe from the days of the Provencal trouba- 
dours. In the Canterbury Tales, however, and in most other 
works where this spirit appears, the puritanism (if so it is 
to be called) is merely one of the forms of the poetry ; in Piers 
Ploughman the poetry is principally a form or expression of the 
puritanism. 

The rhythm or measure of the verse in thi^ poem must be con- 
sidered as accentual rather than syllabical — that is to say, it 
depends rather upon the number of the accents than of the syl- 
lables. This is, perhaps, the original principle of all verse ; and 
it still remains the leading principle in various kinds of verse, 
both in our own and in other langmages. At first, probably, 
only the accented syllables were counted, or reckoned of any 
rhythmical value ; other syllables upon which there was no 
emphasis went for nothing, and might be introduced in any 
part of the verse, one, two, or three at a time, as the poet chose. 
Of course it would at all times be felt that there were limits 
beyond which this licence could not be carried without destroy- 
ing or injuring the metiical character of the composition ; but 
these limits would not at first be fix:ed as they now for the most 
part are. The elementary foim of the verse in Piers Ploughman 
demands a succession of four accented syllables — two in the first 
hemistich or short line, and two in the second ; but, while each 
of those in the first line is usually preceded by either one or two 
unaccented syllables, commonly only one of those in the second 
line is so preceded. The second line, therefore, is for the most 
part shorter than the first. And they also differ in regard to the 
alliteration : it being required that in the first both the accented 
or emphatic syllables, which are generally initial syllables, should 
begin with the same letter, but that in the second only the first 
accented syllable should begin with that letter. This is the 
general rule; but, either from the text being corrupt or from 
the irregularity of the composition, the exceptions are very 
numerous. 

The poem begins as follows-: — 

In a summer season, 
When soft was the sun, 



114 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

I slioop me into shrowds ^ 

As I a sheep 2 were; 
In habit as an hermit 

Unholy of werkes,^ 
Went wide in this world 

Wonders to hear ; 
Ac* on a May mor^vening 

On Malvern hills 
Me befel a ferly,^ 

Of fairy me thongiit. 
I was weary for- wandered,^ 

And went me to rest 
Under a brood^ bank. 

By a burn's^ side ; 
And as I lay and leaned, 

And looked on the waters, 
I slombered into a sleeping, 

It swayed so miiry.^ 
Then gan I meten^° 

A marvellous sweven/^ 
That I was in a \^alderness, 

Wist I never where ; 
And, as I beheld into the east 

On high to the sun, 
I seigh^^ a tower on a toft^^ 

Frieliche ymaked," 
A deep dale bener^th, 

A donjon therein, 
With deep ditches and daxke, 

And dreadful of sight. 
A fair field full of folk 

Found I there between, 
Of all manner of men. 

The mean and the rich, 
Werking^^ and wandering 

As the world asketh. 
Some putten hem^*^ to the plough, 

Playden full seld,i' 



^ I put myself into clothes, - A shepherd. 

■^ Whitaker's interpretation is, " in habit, not like an anchorite who keeps 
liis cell, but like one of those unholy hermits who wander about the world to 
see and hear wonders." He reads, " That went forth in the worl," &c. 
4 And. ° Wonder. ^ Worn out with wandering. 

' Broad. ^ Stream's. ^ It sounded so pleasant. 

10 Meet. 11 Dream. 12 gaw. 

1"' An elevated ground. '^^ Handsomely built. ^^ Working. 

iG Put them. '7 Played full eeldora. 



PIERS PLOUGfmAN. 115 

In setting and sowing 

Swonken^ full hard. 
And wonnen that wasters 

With gluttony destroyeth.^ 
And some putten hem to pride, 

Apparelled hem thereafter, 
In countenance of clothing 

Comen deguised,^ 
In prayers and penances 

Putten hem many,'^ 
All for the love of our Lord 

Liveden full strait,^ 
In hope to have after 

Heaven-riche bliss f 
As anchoi-s and heremites^ 

That holden hem in hir^ cells. 
And coveten nought in country 

To carryen about, 
For no likerous liflode 

Hir likame to please.^ 
And some chosen chaffer :^° 

They cheveden^^ the better, 
As it seemeth to our sight 

That swich me thriveth.^ 
And some murths to make 

As minstralles con,^^ 
And geten gold with hir glee,^^ 

Guiltless, I lieve.^^ 
Ac japers and jaugellers^^ 

Judas' children, 
Feignen hem fantasies 

And fools hem maketh, 
And ban hir^^ wit at will 

To werken if they w^old. 
That Poul preacheth of hem 

I wol nat preve-^^ it here : 
But qui loquitur turpiloquiurn}^ 

Is Jupiter's hine.^' 



Laboured. ^ Wan that which wasters with gluttony destroy. 

^ Came disguised. Whitaker reads, " In countenance and in clothing. "^ 
^ Many put them, applied themselves to, engaged in. 
° Lived full strictly. ^ The bliss of the kingdom of heaven, 

' Anchorites and eremites or hermits. ^ Hold them in their. 

^ By no hkerous living then- bcdy to please. ^" Merchandise. 

11 Achieved their end. 12 That such men thrive. 

1^ And some are skilled to make mirths, or amusements, as minstrels. 
'■^ Arid get o:old with their minstrelsy. ^^ Believe. 

^^ But jesters aud jugglers. i'' Have their. ^^ Will not prove. 

1-^ Whoso spetiketh ribaldry. '^'^ Our modern hind, or servant. 



116 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

Bidders^ and beggars 

Fast about yede,^ 
With Mr bellies and hir bags 

Of bread full y-crammed, 
Faiteden^ for hir food, 

Foughten at the ale : 
In gluttony, God wot, 

Go they to bed, 
And risen with ribaudry,* 

Tho Eoberd's knaves ;^ 
Sleep and sorry slewth^ 

Sueth^ hem ever. ■* 
Pilgrims and palmers 

Plighten hem togider^ 
For to seeken Saint Jame 

And saintes at Eome : 
They wenten forth in hir way^ 

With many wise tales, 
And hadden leave to lien^° 

All hir life after. 
I seigh some that seiden^^ 

They had y-sought saints : 
To each a tale that they told 

Hir tongue was tempered to lie^ 
More than to say sooth, 

It seemed by Mr speech. 
Hermits on an heap,^^ 

With hooked staves, 
Wenten to Walsingham, . 

And hir wenches after ; 
Great loobies and long, 

That loath were to swink,^* 
Clothed hem in copes 

To be knowen from other, 
And shopen hem^^ hermits 

Hir ease to have. 
I found there freres, 

All the four orders, 
Preaching the people 

For profit of hem selve 



» Petitioners. 2 ^gnt. ^ Flattered. ^ jjise with ribaldry. 

■^ Those Eobertsmen — a class of malefactors mentioned in several statutes 
of the fourteenth century. The name may have meant originally Eobin 
Hood's men, as Whitaker conjectures. 

^ Sloth. 7 Pursue. 

^ Gather them together. ^ They went forth on their way. 

'" To lie. 11 I saw some that said. 

'- In every tale that they told their tongue was trained to lie. 

'3 In a crowd. ^^ Labour. ^^ Made themselves. 



PIERS PLOUGHMAN 117 

the gospel 
As hem good liked •} 
For covetise of copes^ 

Construed it as they would. 
Many of these master freres 

Now clothen hem at liking,^ 
For hir money and hir merchandize 

Marchen togeders. 
For sith charity hath been chapman, 

And chief to shrive lords, 
Many ferlies han fallen^ 

In a few years : 
But holy church and hi^ 

Hold better togeders, 
The most misclhef on mould^ 

Is mounting well fast. 
There preached a pardoner, 

As he a priest were ; 
Brought forth a bull 

With many bishops' seals, 
And said that himself might 

Assoilen hem all, 
Of falsehede of fasting,^ 

Of avowes y-broken. 
Lewed^ men leved^ it well, 

And liked his words ; 
Comen up kneeling 

To kissen his bulls : 
He bouched^° liem with his brevet," 

And bleared hir eyen,^^ 
And raught with bis ragman^^ 

Hinges and brooches. 

Here it will be admitted, we have both a well-filled canvas 
and a picture with a good deal of life and stir in it. The satiric 
touches are also natural and eifective ; and the expression clear, 
easy, and not deficient in vigour. 

^ As it seemed to them good. 2 Covetousness of copes or rich clothing. 

3 Clothe themselves to their liking. ^ Many wonders have happened. 

^ Unless holy chm-ch and they. ^ The greatest mischief on earth, 

7 Of breaking fast-days. ^ Ignorant. ^ Loved. 

^1^ Stopped their mouths. ^^ Little brief. ^^ Bedimmed their eyes. 

^^ Reached, drew in, with his catalogue or roll of names ? 




118 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

PIERS ploughman's CREED. 

The popularity of Langland's poem appears to have brought 
alliterative verse into fashion again even for poems of consider- 
able length : several romances were written, in it, such as that of 
William and the Werwolf, that of Alexander, that of Jerusalem, 
and others ; and the use of it was continued throughout the 
greater part of the fifteenth century. But the most remarkable 
imitation of the Vision is the poem entitled Piers the Plough- 
man's Creed, which appears to have been written about the end 
of the fourteenth century: it was first printed separately at 
London, in 4to. by Eeynold Wolfe, in 1553 ; then by Eogers, 
along with the Vision, in 1561. In modern times it has also 
been printed separately, in 1814, as a companion to Whitaker's 
edition of the Vision ; and, along with the Vision, in Mr. 
Wright's edition of 1842. The Creed is the composition of a 
follower of Wyclif, and an avowed opponent of Eomanism. 
Here, Mr. Wright observes, " Piers Ploughman is no longer an 
allegorical personage: he is the simple represeniative of the 
peasant rising up to judge and act for himself — the English 
sans-culotte of the fourteenth century, if we may be allowed the 
comparison." The satire, or invective, in this effusion (which 
consists only of 1697 short lines), is directed altogether against 
the clergy, and especially the monks or friars; and Piers or 
Peter is represented as a poor ploughman from whom the writer 
receives that instruction in Christian truth which he had sought 
for in vain from every order of these licensed teachers. The 
language is quite as antique as that of the Vision, as may appear 
from the following passage, in which Piers is introduced : — 

Then turned I me forth, 

And talked to myself 
Of the falseliede of this folk, 

How faithless they weren 
And as I went by the way 

Weeping for sorrow, 
I see a seely^ man me by 

Opon the plough hongen.^ 
His coat was of a clont^ 

That cary* was y-called ; 
His hood was full of holes, 

And his hair out ; 



' Simple. 2 Hung, bent, over. 3 Cloth. 

^ This is probably the same word that we have elsewhere in caury maury. 
It would seem to be the name of a kind of cloth. 



PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S CREED. 119 

With his knopped shoon^ 

Clouted full thick, 
His ton^ toteden^ out 

As he the loud treaded : 
His hosen overhongen his hoc-shynes^ 

On everich a side, 
All beslomered^ in fen^ 

As he the plough followed. 
Twey^ mittens as meter^ 

Made all of clouts, 
The fingers weren for-weard^ 

And full of fen honged. 
This whit^^ wasled^^ in the feen^=^ 

Almost to the ancle : 
Four rotheren^s him beforn. 

That feeble were worthy ;^* 
Men might reckon each a rib^' 

So rentful^° they weren. 
His wife walked him with. 

With a long goad, 
In a cutted coat 

Gutted full high, 
Wrapped in a winnow^^ sheet 

To wearen her fi'o weders,^^ 
Barefoot on the bare ice. 

That the blood followed. 
And at the lond's end^^ lath^^ 

A little crom-bolle,^^ 
And thereon lay a little child 

Lapped in clouts, 
And tweyn of twey years old^^ 

Opon another side. 
And all they songen^^ o'^ song, 

That sorrow was to hearen ; 
They crieden all o cry, 

A careful note. 



1 Knobbed shoes. 2 Toes. ^ Peeped. 

^ Neither of Mr. Wriglit's explanations seems quite satisfactory ; " crooked 
shins ;" or "the shin towards the hock or ankle?" 

5 Bedaubed. 6 j^i^d. 7 Two. 

^ Mr. Wright suggests fitter ; which does not seem to make sense. 

3 Were worn out. 1° Wight. ^^ Dirtied himself. 

^2 Fen, mud. ^ ^^ Oxen (the Four Evangelists). 

^^ Become ? Perhaps the true reading is forthy, that is, for that. 

^' Each rib. ^^ Meagre ? ^7 Winnowing. 

^^ The meaning seems to be, " to protect her from the weather." 

" The end of the field. 20 Lieth ? 

2* Mr. Wright explains by " crimi-bowl." 

22 Two of two years old. 23 gang. 24 Qne. 



120 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

The seely man sighed sore, 

And said, " Children, bety still." 
This man looked opon me, 

And leet the plough stonden ;^ 
And said, " Seely man, 

Why sighest thou so hard ? 
Gif thee lack lifelode,^ 

Lene thee ich will^ 
Swich^ good as God hath sent : 

Go we, leve brother."^ 



1 Be. 2 Let i\^q plough stand. 

3 If livelihood lack, or be wanting to, thee. 

4 Give or lend thee I will. ^ Suoh, 
^ Let us go, dear brother. 



121 



THIED ENaLISH. 

(Mixed or Compound English.) 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 

The Vision of Piers PloTighman is our earliest poetical work of 
any considerable extent that may still be read with pleasure ; 
but not much of its attraction lies in its poetry. It interests us 
chiefly as rather a lively pictnre (which, however, would have 
been nearly as effective in prose) of much in the manners and 
general social condition of the time, and of the new spirit of 
opposition to old things which was then astir; partly, too, by 
the language and style, and as a monument of a peculiar species 
of versification. Langland, or whoever was the author, probably 
contributed by this great work to the advancement of his native 
tongue to a larger extent than he has had credit for. The 
grammatical forms of his English will be found to be very 
nearly, if not exactly the same with those of Chaucer's; his 
vocabulary, if more sparingly admitting the non-Teutonic ele- 
ment, still does not abjure the principle of the same composite 
constitution ; nor is his style much inferior in mere regularity 
and clearness. So long a work was not likely to have been 
undertaken except by one who felt himself to be in full pos- 
session of the language as it existed : the writer was no doubt 
prompted to engage in such a task in great part by his gift of 
ready expression ; and he could not fail to gain additional fluency 
and skill in the course of the composition, especially with a 
construction of verse demanding so incessant an attention to 
words and S3^11ables. The popularity of the poem, too, would 
diffuse and establish whatever improvements in the language it 
may have introduced or exemplified. In addition to the ability 
displayed in it, and the popular spirit of the day with which it 
was animated, its position in the national literature naturally 
and deservedly gave to the Vision of Piers Ploughman an extra- 
ordinary influence ; for it has the distinction (so far as is either 
known or probable) of being the earliest original work, of any 
magnitude, in the present form of the language. Kobert of 
Gloucester and Eobert de Biiinne, Langland's predecessors, were 
both, it may be remembered, only translators or paraphrasts. 



122 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

If Langland, however, is our earliest original writer, Chaucer 
is still our first great poet, and the true father of our literature, 
properly so called. Compared with his productions, all that 
precedes is barbarism. But what is much more remarkable is, 
that very little of what has followed in the space of nearly five 
centuries that has elapsed since he lived and wrote is worth}^ of 
being compared with what he has left us. He is in our English 
poetry almost M^hat Homer is in that of Greece, and Dante in 
that of Italy — at least in his own sphere still the greatest light. 

Although, therefore, according to the scheme of the history of 
the language which has been propounded, the third form of it, or 
that which still subsists, may be regarded as having taken its 
commencement perhaps a full century before the date at which 
we are now arrived, and so as taking in the works, not only of 
Langland, but of his predecessors from Robert of Gloucester 
inclusive, our living English Literature may be most fitly held 
to begin with the poetry of Chaucer. It will thus count an 
existence already of above five centuries. Chaucer is supposed 
to have been born about the beginning of the reign of Edward 
III. — in the year 1328, if we may trust what is said to have 
been the ancient inscription on his tombstone ; so that he had 
no doubt begun to write, and was probably well known as 
a poet, at least as early as Langland. They may indeed 
have been contemporaries in the strictest sense of the word, 
for anything that is ascertained. If Langland wrote the 
Creed of Piers Ploughman, as well as the Vision, which 
(although it has not, we believe, been suggested) is neither 
impossible nor very unlikely, he must have lived to as late, or 
very nearly as late, a date as Chaucer, who is held to have died 
in 1400, At the same time, as Langland's greatest, if not only, 
work appears to have been produced not long after the middle of 
the reign of Edward III., and the composition of Chaucer's 
Canterbury Tales not to have been begun tiU about the middle of 
that of Richard II., the probability certainly is, regard being 
had to the species and character of these poems, each seemingly 
impressed with a long experience of life, that Langland, if not 
the earlier writer, was the elder man. 

The writings of Chaucer are ver}^ voluminous ; comprising, in 
80 far as they have come down to us, in verse. The Canterbury 
Tales; the Romaunt of the Rose, in 7701 lines, a translation 
from the French Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and 
Jean de Meun; Troilus and Creseide, in Five Books, on the 
Bame subject as the Filostrato of Boccaccio ; The House of Fame, 
in Three Books ; Chaucer's Dream, in 2235 lines ; the Book of 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 123 

the Ducliess (sometimes called the Dream of Chaucer), 1334 
lines ; the Assembly of Fowls, 694 lines ; the Flower and the 
Leaf, 695 lines ; the Court of Love, 1442 lines ; together with 
many ballads and other minor pieces : and in prose (besides 
portions of the Canterbury Tales), a translation of Boethius' 
De Consolatione Philosophise ; the Testament of Love, an imi- 
tation of the same treatise ; and a Treatise on the Astrolabe, 
addressed to his son Lewis in 1391, of which, however, we have 
only two ont of five parts of which it was intended to consist. 
All these works have been printed, most of them more than 
once ; and a good many other pieces have also been attributed to 
Chancer which are either known to be the compositions of other 
poets, or of which at least there is no evidence or probability 
that he is the author. Only the Canterbury Tales, however, 
have as yet enjoyed the advantage of anything like careful 
editing. Tyrwhitt's elaborate edition was first published, in 
4 vols. 8vo., in 1775, his Glossary to all the genuine works of 
Chaucer having followed in 1778 ; and another edition, present- 
ing a new text, and also accompanied with notes and a Glossary, 
was brought out by Mr. T. Wright for the Percy Society in 
1847. 

In his introductory Essay on the Language and Versification 
of Chaucer, Tyrwhitt observes, that at the time when this great 
writer made his first essays the use of rhyme was established in 
English poetry, not exclusively (as we have seen by the example 
of the Vision of Piers Ploughman), but very generally, " so that 
in this respect he had little to do but to imitate his predecessors." 
But the metrical part of our poetry, the learned editor conceives, 
" was capable of more improvement, by the polishing of the 
measui^es already in use, as well as by the introduction of new 
modes of versification." " With respect," he continues, " to the 
regular measures then in use, they may be reduced, I think, to 
four. First, the long Iambic metre, consisting of not more than 
fifteen nor less than fourteen syllables, and broken by a ceesura 
at the eighth syllable. Secondly, the Alexandrine metre, con- 
sisting of not more than thirteen syllables nor less than twelve, 
with a caesura at the sixth. Thirdly, the Octosyllable metre, 
which was in reality the ancient dimeter Iambic. Fourthly, the 
stanza of six verses, of which the first, second, fourth, and fifth 
were in the complete octosyllable metre, and the third and last 
cataleetic — that is, wanting a syllable, or even two." The first 
of these metres Tyrwhitt considers to be exemplified in the 
Ormulum, and probably also in the Chronicle of Eobert of 
Gloucester, if the genuine text could be recovered ; the second, 



124 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

apparently, hj Eobert de Brunne, in imitation of his French 
orio-inal, although his verse in Hearne's edition is frequently- 
defective : the third and fourth were very common, being then 
generally used in lighter compositions, as they still are. " In 
the first of these metres," he proceeds, " it does not appear that 
Chaucer ever composed at all (for I presume no one can imagine 
that he was the author of Gamelyn), or in the second; and in 
the fourth we have nothing of his hut the Ehyme of Sire Thopas, 
which, being intended to ridicule the vulgar romancers, seems 
to have been purposely written in their favourite metre. In the 
third, or octosyllable metre, he has left several compositions, 
particularly an imperfect translation of the Eoman de la Eose, 
which was probably one of his earliest performances, The House 
of Fame, The Dethe of the Duchesse Blanche, and a poem 
called his Dreme : upon all which it will be sufficient here to 
observe in general, that, if he had given no other proofs of his 
poetical facult}^ these alone must have secured to him the pre- 
eminence above all his predecessors and contemporaries in point 
of versification. But by far the most considerable part of 
Chaucer's works is written in that kind of metre vhich we now 
call the Heroic, either in distich s or stanzas ; and, as I have not 
been able to discover any instance of this metre being used by 
any English poet before him, I am much inclined to suppose 
that he was the first introducer of it into our language." It had 
been long practised by the writers both in the northern and 
southern French; and within the half century before Chaucer 
wrote it had been successfully cultivated, in preference to every 
other metre, by the great poets of Italy — Dante, Petrarch, and 
Boccaccio. Tyrwhitt argues, therefore, that Chaucer may have 
borrowed his new English verse either from the French or from 
the Italian. 

That the particular species of verse in which Chaucer has 
written his Canterbury Tales and /;Ome of his other poems had 
not been used by any other English poet before him, has not, we 
believe, been disputed, and does not appear to be disputable, at 
least from such remains of our early poetical literature as we 
now possess. Here, then, is one important fact. It is certain, 
also, that the French, if not likewise the Italian, poets who 
employed the decasyllabic (or more properly hendecasyllabic *) 

* In the Italian language, at least, the original and proper form of the verse 
appears to have consisted of eleven syllables ; whence the generical name of 
the metre is endecasyllaho, and a verse of ten syllables is called endecasyllaho 
tronco, and one of twelve, endecasrjlldbo sdrucciolo. But these variations do not 
affect the prosodical character of the verse, which requires only that the tenth 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 125 

metre were well known to Chancer. The presumption, there- 
fore, that his new metre is, as Tyrwhitt asserts, this same Italian 
or French metre of ten or eleven syllables (onr present heroic 
verse) becomes very strong. 

Moreover, if Chaucer's verse be not constructed upon the 
principle of syllabical as well as accentual regularity, when was 
this principle, which is now the law and universal practice of 
our poetry, introduced? It v\dll not be denied to have been 
completely established ever since the language acquired in all 
material respects its present form and pronunciation — that is to 
say, at least since the middle of the sixteenth centuiy : if it was 
not by Chaucer at the end of the fourteenth, by whom among 
his followers in the course of the next hundred and fifty years 
was it first exemplified ? 

At present it is sufficient to say that no one of his successors 
thi'oughout this space has hinted that any improvement, any 
change, had been made in the construction of English verse 
since Chaucer wrote. On the contrary, he is generally recog- 
nized by them as the great reformer of our language and our 
poetry, and as their master and instructor in their common art. 
By his friend and disciple Occleve he is called " the first finder 
of our fair langage." So Lydgate, in the next generation, 
celebrates him as his master^ — as " chief poet of Britain " — as 

— "he that was of making soverain, 
"Whom all this lande of right ought prefer, 



and as- 



" The noble rhethor poet of Britain, 
That worthy was the lam-er to have 



should be in all cases the last accented syllable. The modern English heroic, 
or, as we commonly call it, ten-syllahled Terse, still admits of heing extended 
by an eleventh or even a twelfth unaccented syllable ; although, from the con- 
stitution of onr present language as to syllabic emphasis, such extension is 
with us the exception, not the rule, as it is (at least to the length of eleven 
syllables) in Itahan. It may be doubted whether Chaucer's type or model 
line is to be considered as decasyllabic or hendecasyllabic ; Tyrwhitt was of 
opinion that the greater number of his verses, when properly written and pro- 
nounced, would be found to consist of eleven sj'llables ; and this will seem 
probable, if we look to what is assumed, on the theory of his versification 
which we are considering, to have been the pronunciation of the language in 
his day. At the same time many of his lines evidently consist (even on this 
theory) of ten syllables only ; and such a construction of verse for ordinary 
purposes is become so much more agreeable to modern usage and taste that 
his poetry had better be so read whenever it can be done, even at the cost 
of thereby somewhat violating the exactness of the ancient pronunciation. 



126 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Of poetrye, and the palm attain ; 

That made first to distil and rain 

The gold dew-drops of speech and eloquence 

Into our tongue through his excellence, 

And found the flowres first of rhetoric 

Our rude speech only to enlumine," &c. 

A later writer, Gawin Douglas, sounds his praise as — 

" Yenerahle Chaucer, principal poet hut^ peer. 
Heavenly trumpet, orlege,^ and regulere ; ^ 
In eloquence halm, condict,'' and dial, 
Milky fountain, clear strand, and rose rial," ^ 

in a strain, it must be confessed, more remarkable for enthusiastic 
vehemence than for poetical inspiration. The learned, and at 
the same time elegant, Leland, in the next age describes him as 
the writer to whom his country's tongue owes all its beauties : — 

" Anglia Chaucerum veneratur nostra poetam, 
Cui veneres debet patria lingua suas ;" 

and again, in another tribute, as having first reduced the language 
into regular foim : — 

" Linguam qui patriam redegit illam 
In formam." 

And such seems to have been the unbroken tradition down to 
Spenser, who, looking back through two centuries, hails his 
great predecessor as still the " well of English undefiled." 

If now we proceed to examine Chaucer's verse, do we find it 
actually characterized by this regularity, which indisputably 
has at least from within a century and a half of his time been the 
law of our poetry? Not, if we assume that the English of 
Chaucer's time v\ras read in all respects precisely like that of our 
own day. But are we warranted in assuming this ? We know 
that some changes have taken place in the national pronun- 
ciation within a much shorter space. The accentuation of 
many words is different even in Shakespeare and his contempo- 
raries from what it now is : even since the language has been 
what we may call settled, and the process of growth in it nearly 
stopped, there has still been observable a disposition in the accent 
or syllabic emphasis to project itself with more precipitation than 
formerly, to seize upon a more early enunciated part in dissyl-. 
lables and other polysyllabic words than that to which it was 

* Without. 2 Horologe, clock or watch. 

3 Eegulator. ^ Condiment. ^ Royal, 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 127 

wont to be attached. For example, we now always pronounce 
the word aspect with the accent on the first syllable ; in the time 
of Shakespeare it was always accented on the last. We now call 
a certain short composition an essay ; but only a century ago it 
was called an essay : " And write next winter," says Pope, 
" more essays on man." Probably at an earlier period, when 
this change was going on more actively, it was part of that 
general process by which the Teutonic, or native, element in our 
language eventually, after a long struggle, acquired the as- 
cendancy over the French element ; and, if so, for a time the 
accentuation of many words would be unfixed, or would oscillate 
between the two systems — the French habit of reserving itself 
for the final syllable, and the native tendency to cling to a prior 
portion of the word. This appears to have been the case in 
Chaucer's day : many words are manifestly in his poetry accented 
differently from what they are now (as is proved, upon either 
theory of his prosody, when they occur at the end of a verse), 
and in many also he seems to vary the accent— pronouncing, for 
instance, Idngage in one line, langage in another — as suits his con- 
venience. But again, under the tendency to elision and abbre- 
viation, which is common to all languages in a state of growth, 
there can be no doubt that, in the progress of the English 
tongue, from its first subjection to literary cultivation in the 
middle of the thirteenth century to its final settlement in the 
middle of the seventeenth, it dropt and lost altogether many 
short or unaccented syllables. Some of these, indeed, our 
poets still assert their right to revive in pressing circumstances : 
thus, though we now almost universally elide or suppress the e 
before the terminating d of the preterites and past participles of 
our verbs, it is still sometimes called into life again to make a 
distinct syllable in verse. Two centuries ago, when perhaps it 
was generally heard in the common speech of the people (as it 
still is in some of our provincial dialects), and when its sup- 
pression in reading prose would probably have been accounted 
an irregularity, it was as often sounded in verse as not, and the 
licence was probably considered to be taken when it was elided. 
The elision, when it took place, was generally marked by the 
omission of the vowel in the spelling. If we go back another 
century, we find the pronunciation of the termination as a 
distinct syllable to be clearly the rule and the prevailing 
practice, and the suppression of the vowel to be the rare ex- 
ception. But even at so late a date as the end of the sixteenth 
and the beginning of the seventeenth century, other short vowels 
as well as this were still occasionally pronounced, as they were 



128 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

almost always written. Both the genitive or possessive singular 
and the nominative plural of nouns were, down to this time, 
made by the addition not of s only, as now, but of es to the 
nominative singular ; and the es makes a distinct syllable some- 
times in Shakespeare, and often in Spenser. In Chaucer, there- 
fore, it is only what we should expect that it should generally be 
so pronounced : it is evident that originally, or when it first 
appeared in the language, it always was, and that the practice of 
running it and the preceding syllable together, as we now do, 
has only been gradually introduced and established. 

The deficiencies of Chaucer's metre, Tyrwhitt contends, are to 
be chiefly supplied by the pronunciation of what he calls " the 
e feminine ;" by which he means the e which still terminates so 
many of our words, but is now either totally silent and ineffective 
in the pronunciation, or only lengthens or otherwise alters the 
sound of the preceding vowel — in either case is entirely in- 
operative upon the syllabication. Thus, s^^ch words as large^ 
strange, time, &c., he conceives to be often dissyllables, and such 
words as Eomaine, sentence, often trisyllables, in Chaucer. Some 
words also he holds to be lengthened a syllable by the inter- 
vention of such an e, now omitted both in speaking and v/riting, 
in the middle — as in jug-e-ment, command-e-ment, vouch-e-safe, &c. 

Wallis, the distinguished mathematician, in his Grammar of 
the English Language (written in Latin, and published about 
the middle of the seventeenth century) had suggested that the 
origin of this silent e probably was, that it had originally been 
pronounced, though somewhat obscurely, as a distinct syllable, 
like the French e feminine, which still counts for such in the 
prosody of that language. Wallis adds, that the surest proof of 
this is to be found in our old poets, with whom the said e some- 
times makes a syllable, sometimes not, as the verse requires. 
" With respect to words imported directly from France," 
observes Tyrwhitt, "it is certainly quite natural to suppose 
that for some time they retained their native pronunciation." 
" We have not indeed," he continues, "so clear a proof of the 
original pronunciation of the Saxon part of our language ; but 
we know, from general observation, that all changes of pro- 
nunciation are generally made by small degrees ; and, therefore, 
when we find that a great number of those words which in 
Chaucer's time ended in e originally ended in a, we may reason- 
ably presume that our ancestors first passed from the broader 
sound of a to the thinner sound of e feminine, and not at once 
from a to e mute. Besides, if the final e in such words was not 
pronounced, why was it added ? From the time that it has con- 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 129 

fessedljr ceased to be pronounced it lias been graduall}/' omitted in 
them, except where it may be supposed of use to lengthen or 
soften the preceding syllable, as in hope, name, &c. But according 
to the ancient orthography it terminates many words of Saxon 
original where it cannot have been added for any such purpose, 
as herte, childe, olde, wilde, &c. In these, therefore, we must 
suppose that it was pronounced as e feminine, and made part of a 
second syllable, and so, by a parity of reason, in all others in 
which, as in these, it appears to have been substituted for the 
Saxon a." From all this Tyrwhitt concludes that " the pro- 
nunciation of the e feminine is founded on the very nature of 
both the French and Saxon parts of our language," and therefore 
that " what is generally considered as an e mute, either at the 
end or in the middle of words, was anciently pronounced, but 
obscurely, like the e feminine of the French." In a note, 
referring to an opinion expressed by Wallis, who, observing that 
the French very often suppressed this short e in their common 
speech, was led to think that the pronunciation of it would 
perhaps shortly be in all cases disused among them, as among 
ourselves, he adds: " The prediction has certainly failed ; but, 
notwithstanding, I will venture to say that when it was made it 
was not unworthy of Wallis's sagacity. Unluckily for its 
success, a number of eminent writers happened at that very time 
to be growing up in France, whose works, having since been 
received as standards of style, must probably fix for many 
centuries the ancient usage of the e feminine in poetry, and of 
course give a considerable check to the natural progress of the 
language. If the age of Edward III. had been as favourable to 
letters as that of Louis XIV. ; if Chaucer and his contemporary 
poets had acquired the same authority here that Comeille, 
Moliere, Eacine, and Boileau have obtained in France ; if their 
works had been published by themselves, and perpetuated in a 
genuine state by printing ; I think it probable that the e femi- 
nine would still have preserved its place, in our poetical 
language at least, and certainly without any prejudice to the 
smoothness of our versification." 

In supporting his views by these reasons, Tyrwhitt avoids 
having recourse to any arguments that might be drawn from the 
practice of Chaucer himself — that being in fact the matter in 
dispute ; but his main proposition, to the extent at least of the 
alleged capacity of the now silent final e to make a distinct 
syllable in Chaucer's day, appears to be demonstrated by some 
instances in the poet's works. Thus, for example, in the follow- 
ing coujjlet from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, unless 



130 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tlie word Rome whicli ends the first line be pronounced as a dis- 
syllable, there will be no rhyme :— - 

" That straight was comen from the court of Eome ; 
Full loud he sang — Come hither, love, to me." 

So again, in the Canon Yeoman's Tale, we have the following 
lines : — 

" And when this alchymister saw his time, 
Eis'th up, Sir Priest, quod he, and stondeth hy me," 

in the first of which time must evidently in like manner be read 
as a word of two syllables. The same rhyme occurs in a quatrain 
in the Second Book of the Troilus and Creseide : — 

" All easily now, for the love of Marte, 

Quod Pandarus, for every thing hath time, 
So long abide, till that the night departe 
For all so sicker as thou liest here hy me." 

Finding Rome and time to be clearly dissyllables in these pas- 
sages, it would seem that we ought, as Tyrwhitt remarks (Note 
on Prol. to Cant. Tales, 674), to have no scruple so to pronounce 
them and other similar words wherever the metre requires it. 

" The notion, probably, which most people have of Chaucer," 
to borrow a few sentences of what we have written elsewhere, 
"is merely that he was a remarkably good poet for his day; 
but that, both from his language having become obsolete, and 
from the advancement which we have since made in poetical 
taste and skill, he may now be considered as fairly dead and 
buried in a literary, as well as in a literal, sense. This, wb 
suspect, is the common belief even of educated persons and of 
scholars who have not actually made acquaintance with Chaucer, 
but know him only by name or by sight; — by that antique- 
sounding dissyllable that seems to belong to another nation and 
tongue, as well as to another age ; and by that strange costume 
of diction, grammar, and spelling, in which his thoughts are 
clothed, fluttering about them, as it appears to do, like the rags 
upon a scarecrow. 

" Kow, instead of this, the poetry of Chaucer is really, in all 
essential respects, about the greenest and freshest in our lan- 
guage. We have some higher poetry than Chaucer's — poetry 
that has more of the character of a revelation, or a voice from 
another world : we have none in which there is either a more 
abounding or a more bounding spirit of life, a truer or fuller 
natural inspiration. He may be said to verify, in another sense, 
the remark of Bacon, that what we commonly call antiquity was 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 131 

really tlie yontli of the world : his poetry seems to breathe of a 
time when humanity was younger and more joyons-hearted than 
it now is. Undoubtedly he had an advantage as to this matter, 
in haying been the first great poet of his coimtry. Occupying 
this position, he stands in some degree between each of his suc- 
cessors and nature. The sire of a nation's minstrelsy is of neces- 
sity, thongh it may be unconsciously, regarded by all who come 
after him as almost a portion of nature — as one whose utterances 
are not so much the echo of hers as in very deed her own living 
voice — carrying in them a spirit as original and divine as the 
music of her running brooks, or of her breezes among the leaves. 
And there is not wanting something of reason in this idolatry. 
It is he alone who has conversed with nature directly, and 
without an interpreter — who has loolced upon the glory of her 
countenance unveiled, and received upon his heart the per- 
fect image of what she is. Succeeding poets, by reason of his 
intervention, and that imitation of him into which, in a greater 
or less degree, they are of necessity drawn, see her only, as it 
were, wrapt in hazy and metamorphosing adornments, which 
human hands have woven for her, and are prevented from per- 
fectly discerning the outline and the movements of her form by 
that encumbering investiture. They are the fallen race, who 
have been banished from the immediate presence of the divinity, 
and have been left only to conjecture from afar off the bright- 
ness of that majesty which sits throned to them behind impene- 
trable clouds : he is the First Man, who has seen God walking 
in the garden, and communed with him face to face. 

" But Chaucer is the Homer of his country, not only as 
having been the earliest of her poets (deserving to be so called), 
but also as being still one of her greatest. The names of 
Spenser, of Shakspeare, and of Milton are the only other names 
that can be placed on the same line with his. . 

" His poetry exhibits, in as remarkable a degree perhaps as 
any other in any language, an intermixture and combination 
of what are usually deemed the most opposite excellences. 
Great poet as he is, we might almost say of him that his genius 
has as much about it of the spirit of prose as of poetry, and that, 
if he had not sung so admirably as he has done of flowery 
meadows, and summer skies, and gorgeous ceremonials, and high 
or tender passions, and the other themes over which the imagi- 
nation loves best to pour her vivifying light, he would have won 
to himself the renown of a Montaigne or a Swift by the origi- 
nality and penetrating sagacity of his observations on ordinary 
life, his insight into motives and character, the richness and 



132 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

peculiarity of liis liiimour, the sharp edge of his satire, and the 
propriety, flexibility, and exquisite expressiveness of his refined 
yet natural diction. Even like the varied visible creation 
around us, his poetry too has its earth, its sea, and its sky, and 
all the " sweet vicissitudes " of each. Here you have the clear- 
eyed observer of man as he is, catching ' the manners living as 
they rise,' and fixing them in pictures where not their minutest 
lineament is or ever can be lost : here he is the inspired dreamer, 
by whom earth and all its realities are forgotten, as his spirit 
soars and sings in the finer air and amid the diviner beauty of 
some far-off world of its own. Now the riotous verse rings loud 
with the turbulence of human merriment and laughter, casting 
from it, as it dashes on its way, flash after flash of all the forms 
of wit and comedy ; now it is the tranquillizing companionship 
of the sights and sounds of inanimate nature of which the poet's 
heart is full — the springing herbage, and the dew-drops on the 
leaf, and the rivulets glad beneath the morning ray and dancing 
to their own simple music. From mere narrative and playful 
humour up to the heights of imaginative and impassioned song, 
his genius has exercised itself in all styles of poetry, and won 
imperishable laurels in all."* 

It has been commonly believed that one of the chief sources 
from which Chaucer drew both the form and the spirit of his 
poetry was the recent and contemporary poetry of Italy — that 
eldest portion of what is properly called the literature of modern 
Europe, the produce of the genius of Petrarch and Boccaccio and 
their predecessor and master, JDante. But, although this may 
have been the case, it is by no means certain that it was so ; and 
some circumstances seem to make it rather improbable that 
Chaucer was a reader or student of Italian. Of those of his 
poems which have been supposed to be translations from the 
Italian, it must be considered very doubtful if any one was 
really derived by him from that language. The story of his 
Palamon and Arcite, which, as the Knight's Tale, begins the 
Canterbury Tales, but which either in its present or another 
form appears to have been originally composed as a separate 
work, is substantially the same with that of Boccaccio's heroic 
poem in twelve books entitled Le Teseide — a fact which, we 
believe, was first pointed out by Warton. But an examination 
of the two poems leads rather to the conclusion that they are 
both founded upon a common original than that the one was 
taken from the other. Boccaccio's poem extends to about 12,000 
octosyllabic, Chaucer's to not many more than 2000 decasyllabic, 
* Printing Machine, No. 37 (1835;. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. ^ 133 

verses ; and not only is the stoiy in the one much less detailed 
than in the other, but the tAvo versions differ in some of the 
main circinnstances.* Chancer, moreover, nowhere mentions 
Boccaccio as his original ; on the contrary, as Warton has him- 
self noticed, he professes to draw his materials, not from the 
works of any contemporary, bnt from " olde Stories," and " olde 
bookes that all this story telleth more plain. "I Tyrwhitt, too, 
while holding, as w^ell as Warton, that Chancer's original was 
Boccaccio, admits that the latter was in all probability not the 
inventor of the story. J Boccaccio himself, in a letter relating to 
his poem, describes the story as very ancient, and as existing in 
what he calls Latino volgare, by which he may mean rather the 
Provencal than the Italian. § In fact, as both "Warton and 
Tyrwhitt have shown, there is reason to believe that it had pre- 
viously been one of the themes of romantic poetry in various 
languages. The passages pointed out by Tyrwhitt in his notes 
to Chaucer's poem, as translated or imitated from that of Boc- 
caccio, are few and insignificant, and the resemblances they 
present would be sufficiently accounted for on the supposition of 
both writers having drawn from a common source. Nearly the 
same observations apply to the supposed obligations of Chaucer 
in his Troilus and Creseide to another poetical work of Boc- 
caccio's, his Filostrato. The discovery of these was first an- 
nounced by Tyrwhitt in his Essay prefixed to the Canterbury 
Tales. But Chaucer himself tells us (ii. 14) that he trans- 
lates his poem " out of Latin ;" and in other passages (i. 394, 
and v. 1653), he expressly declares his " auctor " or author, 

* See tins pointed ont by Dr. Nott (who nevertheless assumes the one 
poem to be a translation from the other), in a note to his Dissertation on the 
State of English Poetry before the Sixteenth Century, p. ccLxxiv. 

t Warton's Hist. Eng. Poetry, ii. 179. 

X Introductory Discourse to Canterbury Tales, Note (13). 

§ The letter is addressed to his mistress (la Fiametta), Mary of Aragon, a 
natural daughter of Kobert king of Naples. " Trovata," he says, " una anti- 
chissima storia, ed al piu delle genti non manifesta, in Latino volgare," &e. 
The expression here has a curious resemblance to the words iised by Chaucer 
in enumerating his own works in the Legende of Good Women, xk 420, — 

" He made the boke that hight tire House of Fame, &c. 
And all the love of Palamon and Arcite 
Of Thebes, tliougli the story is hiowen lite.'' 

Tyrwhitt's interpretation of these last words is, that they seem to imply that 
the poem to which they allude, the Palamon and Arcite (as first composed), 
had not made itself very popular. Both he and Warton understand the 
LatinG volgare, as meaning the Italian language in this passage of the letter 
to La Fiametta, as well as in a stanza which he quotes from the Teseide in 
Discourse, Note (9). 



134 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

to be named Lollius. In a note to the Parson's Tale, in the 
Canterbury Tales, Tyrwliitt assumes that Lollius is another 
name for Boccaccio, but how this should be he confesses himself 
unable to explain. In his Glossary (a later publication), he 
merely describes Lollius as "a writer from whom Chaucer pro- 
fesses to have translated his poem of Troilus and Creseide," 
adding, " I have not been able to find any further account of 
him." It is remarkable that he should omit to notice that Lollius 
is mentioned by Chaucer in another poem, his House of Fame 
(iii. 378), as one of the writers of the Trojan story, along with 
Homer, Dares Phrygius, Livy (whom he calls Titus), Guido of 
Colonna, and " English Galfrid," that is, Geoffre}^ of Monmouth. 
The only writer of the name of Lollius of whom anything is 
now known appears to be Lollius Urbicus, who is stated to 
have lived in the third century, and to have composed a history 
of his own time, which, however, no longer exists.* But our 
ignorance of who Chaucer's Lollius was does not entitle us to 
assume that it is Boccaccio whom he designates by that name. 
Besides, the two poems have only that general resemblance 
which would result from their subject being the same, and their 
having been founded upon a common original. Tyrwhitt (note 
to Parson's Tale), while he insists that the fact of the one being 
borrowed from the other "is evident, not only from the fable 
and characters, which are the same in both poems, but also from 
a number of passages in the English which are literally trans- 
lated from the Italian," admits that " at the same time there are 
several long passages, and even episodes, in the Troilus of which 
there are no traces in the Filostrato ;" and Warton makes the 
same statement almost in the same words. f Tyrwhitt acknow- 
ledges elsewhere, too, that the form of Chaucer's stanza in the 
Troilus does not appear ever to have been used by Boccaccio, 
nor does he profess to have been able to find such a stanza in any 
early Italian poetry. J The only other composition of Chaucer's 
for which he can be imagined to have had an Italian original is 
his Clerk's Tale in the Canterbury Tales, the matchless story of 
Gnselda. This is one of the stories of the Decameron ; but it 
was not from Boccaccio's Italian that Chaucer took it, but from i 
Petrarch's Latin, as he must be understood to intimate in the ' 
Prologue, where he says, or makes the narrator say — 



* See Warton, Hist. Eng. Poetry, ii. 220 ; and Vossius, do Historicis La- 
tinis, ed. 1G51, p. 17G. 
t Hist. Eng. Poetry, ii. p. 221, note. 
+ Essay. § y. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 135 

" I woll you tell a tale whicli tljat I 
Learned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, 
As preved by his wordes and his werk : 
He is now dead and nailed in his chest ; 
I pray to God so yeve his soule rest. • 

Francis Petrarch, the laureat poet, 
Highte this clerk, whose rhethoricke sweet 
Enlumined all Itaille of poetrie." 

Petrarch's Latin translation of Boccaccio's tale is, as Tyrwhitt 
states, printed in all tlie editions of his works, nnder the title of 
Ds Ohedientia et Fide Uxoria Mythologia (a Myth on Wifely 
Obedience and Faithfulness). But, indeed, Chaucer may not 
have even had Petrarch's translation before him ; for Petrarch, in 
his letter to Boccaccio, in which he states that he had translated 
it from the Decameron, only recently come into his hands, in- 
forms his friend also that the story had been known to him 
many years before. He may therefore have communicated it 
orally to Chaucer, through the medium of what was probably 
their common medium of communication, the Latin tongue, if 
the}'' ever met, at Padua or elsewhere, as it is asserted they did. 
All that we are concerned with at present, is the fact that it does 
not appear to have been taken by Chaucer from the Decameron : 
he makes no reference to Boccaccio as his authority, and, while 
it is the only one of the Canterbury Tales which could otherwise 
have been suspected with any probability to have been derived 
from that work, it is at the same time one an acquaintance with 
which we know he had at least the means of acquiring through 
another language than the Italian. To these considerations may 
be added a remark made by Sir Harris Nicolas : — " That Chaucer 
was not acquainted with Italian," says that writer, " may be in- 
ferred from his not having introduced any Italian quotation into 
his M^orks, redundant as they are with Latin and French words 
and phrases." To which he subjoins in a note : " Though 
Chaucer's writings have not been examined for the ])urpose, the 
remark in the text is not made altogether from recollection ; for 
at the end of Speght's edition of Chaucer's works translations are 
given of the Latin and French words in the poems, but not a 
single Italian word is mentioned."* 

* Life of Chaucer, p. 25. Sir Harris had said before : — " Though Chaucer 
undoubtedly knew Latin and French, it is by no means certain, notwithstand- 
ing his supposed obligations to the Decameron, that he was as well acquainted 
with Italian. There- may have been a common Latin original of the main 
incidents of many if not of all the Tales for wliich Chaucer is supposed to 
liave been wholly indebted to Boccaccio, and from which original Boccaccio 
himself may have taken them," Beside the Clerk's Tale, which has been 



136 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

It may be questioned, tlien, if mncli more than tlie fame of 
Italian song liad reached the ear of Chaucer ; but, at all events, 
the foreign poetry with which he was most familiar was cer- 
tainly that of France. This, indeed, was probably still ac- 
counted everywhere the classic poetical literature of the modem 
world ; the younger poetry of Italy, which was itself a deriva- 
tion from that common fountain-head, had not yet, with all its 
real superiority, either supplanted the old lays and romances of 
the trouveres and troubadours, or even taken its place by their 
side. The earliest English, as well as the earliest Italian, poetry 
was for the most part a translation or imitation of that of France. 
Of the poetry written in the French language, indeed, in the 
eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the larger portion, as 
we have seen, was produced in England, for English readers, 
and to a considerable extent by natives of this country. French 
poetry was not, therefore, during this era, regarded among us as 
a foreign literature at all ; and even at a later date it must have 
been looked back upon by every educated Englishman as rather 
a part of that of his own land. For a century, or perhaps more, 
before Chaucer arose, the greater number of our common versi- 
fiers had been busy in translating the French romances and 
other poetry into English, which was now fast becoming the 
ordinary or only speech even of the educated classes ; but this 
work had for the most part been done with little pains or skill, 
and with no higher ambition than to convey the mere sense of 
the French original to the English reader. By the time when 
Chaucer began to write, in the latter half of the fourteenth cen- 
tury, the French language appears to have almost gone out of 
use as a common medium of communication ; the English on the 
other hand, as we may see by the poetry of Langland and Minot 
as compared with that of Eobert of Gloucester, had, in the course 
of the preceding hundred years, thrown off much of its primitive 
rudeness, and acquired a considerable degree of regularity and 
flexibility, and general fitness for literary composition. In these 



noticed above, the only stories in the Canterbury Tales which are found 
in the Decameron are the Eeeve's Tale, the Shipman's Tale, and the 
Franklin's Tale ; but both Tyrwhitt and Warton, wliile maintaining Chaucer's 
obligations m other respects to the Italian writers, admit that the two former 
are much more probably derived from French Fabhaux (the particular fabliau, 
indeed, on which the Reeve's Tale appears to be founded has been published 
by Le Grand) ; and the Franklin's Tale is expressly stated by Chaucer liimself 
to be a Breton lay. He nowhere mentions Boccaccio or his Decameron, or 
any other Italian authority. Of the Pardoner's Tale, " the mere outhne," as 
Tyrwliitt states, is to be found in the Cento NoveUe Antiche ; but the greater 
part of that collection is borrowed from the Contes and Fabliaux of the French. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 137 

circnmstances, writing in French in England was over for any- 
good purpose : Chancer himself observes in the prologue to his 
prose treatise entitled the Testament of Love: — " Certes there 
ben some that speak their poesy matter in French, of which 
speech the Frenchmen have as good a fantasy as we have in hear- 
ing of Frenchmen's English." And again : — " Let, then, clerks 
enditen in Latin, for they have th^ property of science and the 
knowinge in that faculty ; and let Frenchmen in their French 
also endite their quaint terms, for it is kindly [natural] to their 
mouths ; and let us show our fantasies in such words as we 
learneden of our dames' tongue." The two languages, in short, 
like the two nations, were now become completely separated, and 
in some sort hostile : as the Kings of England were no longer 
either Dukes of Normandy or Earls of Poitou, and recently a 
fierce war had sprung up still more eifectually to divide the one 
country from the other, and to break up all intercourse between 
them, so the French tongue was fast growing to be almost as 
strange and distinctly foreign among us as the English had 
always been in France. Chaucer's original purpose and aim 
may be supposed to have been that of the generality of his imme- 
diate predecessors, to put his countrymen in possession of some 
of the best productions of the French poets, so far as that could 
be done by translation; and with his genius and accomplish- 
ments, and the greater pains he was willing to take with it, we 
may conjecture that he hoped to execute his task in a manner 
very superior to that in which such work had hitherto been per- 
formed. With these views he undertook what was probably his 
earliest composition of any length, his translation of the lioman 
de la Rose, begun by Guillaume de Lorris, who died about 1 260, 
and continued and finished by Jean de Meun, whose date is 
about half a century later. " This poem," says Warton, " is 
esteemed by the French the most valuable piece of their old 
poetry. It is far beyond the rude efforts of all their ]3rececling 
romancers ; and they have nothing equal to it before the reign 
of Francis the First, who died in the year 1547. But there is a 
considerable difference in the merit of the two authors. William 
of Lorris, who wrote not one quarter of the poem, is remarkable 
for his elegance and luxuriance of description, and is a beautiful 
painter of allegorical personages. John of Meun is a writer of 
another cast. He possesses but little of his predecessor's inven- 
tive and poetical vein ; and in that respect, he was not properly 
qualified to finish a poem begun by AVilliam of Lorris. But he 
has strong satire and great liveliness. He was one of the wits of 
the court of Charles le Bel. The difficulties and dangers of a 



138 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

lover in pursuing and obtaining the object of his desires are the 
literal argument of this poem. This design is couched under the 
ai-gument of a rose, which our lover after frequent obstacles 
gathers in a delicious garden. He traverses vast ditches, scales 
lofty walls, and forces the gates of adamantine and almost im- 
pregnable castles. These enchanted fortresses are all inhabited 
by various divinities ; some of which assist, and some oppose, 
the lover's progress."* The entire poem consists of no fewer 
than 22,734 verses, of which only 4,149 are the composition of 
V\^illiam of Lorris. All this portion has been translated hy 
Chaucer, and also about half of the 18,588 lines written by 
De Meun : his version comprehends 13,105 lines of the French 
poem. These, however, he has managed to comprehend in 7701 
(Warton ssljs 7699) English verses : this is effected by a great 
compression and curtailment of De Menu's part ; for, while the 
4149 French verses of De Lorris are fully and faithfully ren- 
dered in 4432 English verses, the 8956 that follow by De Meun 
are reduced in the translation to 3269. Warton, who exhibits 
ample specimens both of the translation and of the original, con- 
siders that Chaucer has throughout at least equalled De Lorris, 
and decidedly surpassed and improved De Meun. 

No verse so flowing and harmonious as what we have in this 
translation, no diction at once so clear, correct, and expressive, 
had, it is probable, adorned and brought out the capabilities of 
his native tongue when Chaucer began to write. Several of his 
subsequent poems are also in whole or in part translations : the 
Troilus and Creseide, the Legend of Good Women (much of 
which is borrowed from Ovid's Epistles), and others. But we 
must pass over these, and will take our first extract from his 
House of Fame, no foreign original of which has been dis- 
covered, although Warton is inclined to think that it may have 
been translated or paraphrased from the Provencal. Chaucer, 
however, seems to appear in it in his own person ; at least the 
poet or dreamer is in the course of it more than once addressed 
by the name of Geoffrey. And in the following passage he 
seems to describe his own occupation and habits of life. It is 
addressed to him by the golden but living Eagle, who has 
carried him up into the air in his talons, and by whom the 
marvellous sights he relates are shown and explained to him : — 

First, I, that in my feet have thee, 

Of whom thou hast great fear and wonder, 



* Hist. Eng. Poetry, ii. 209. 



GEOFFEEY CHAUCER. 139 

Am dwelling witli the God of Tliimder, 

WMcli men ycallen Jupiter, 

That doth me flyen full oft fer ^ 

To do all his commandement ; 

And for this cause he hath me sent 

To thee ; harken now by thy trouth ; 

Certain he hath of thee great routh,^ 

For that thou hast so truely 

So long served ententifly ^ 

His blinde nephew Cupido, 

And the fair queen Venus also, 

Withouten guerdon ever yet ; 

And natheless "^ hast set thy wit 

Althoughe in thy head full lit is 

To make lx)kes, songs, and dittes^ 

In rhime or elles in cadence, 

As thou best canst, in reverence 

Of Love and of his servants eke, 

That have his service sought and seek ; 

And painest thee to praise his art. 

Although thou haddest never part ; 

"\^Tierefore, so wisely God me bless, 

Jovis yhalt ^ it great humbless, 

And virtue eke, that thou wilt make 

Anight ^ full oft thine head to ache 

In thy study, so thou ywritest, 

And ever more of Love enditest, 

In honour of him and praisings, 

And in his folkes fm-therings, 

And in their matter all devisest, 

And not him ne his folk despisest, 

Although thou may'st go in the dance 

Of them that him list not avance : 

"Wherefore, as I now said, ywis, 

Jupiter considreth well this. 

And als, beau sire,'^ of other things, 

That is, that thou hast no tidings 

Of Loves folk if they be glade, 

ZSTe of nothing else that God made, 

And not only fro ^ fer countree 

That no tidinges comen to thee, 

N'ot of thy very neighebores, 

That dwellen almost at thy dores, 

Thou hearest neither that ne this ; 

For, when thy labour all done is, 



1 Far. 2 R^^tb, pity. 3 Attentively. 

■* Nevertheless. ^ Jove held. ^ O nights, at night 

" Fair sir. s From. 



110 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

And hast made all thy reckonings, 

Instead of rest and of new things, 

Thou goest home to thine house anon. 

And, all so dumb as any stone, 

Thou sittest at another book. 

Till fully dazed is thy look, 

And livest thus as an hermit, 

Although thine abstinence is lit ; 

And therefore Jovis, through his grace, 

Will that I bear thee to a place 

Which that yhight tfie House of Fame, &c. 

From tlie mention of his recTionings in this passage, Tyrwhitt 
conjectures that Chaucer probably wrote the House of Fame 
while he held the office of Comptroller of the Customs of Wools, 
to which he was appointed in 1374. It may be regarded, there- 
fore, as one of the productions of the second or middle stage of 
his poetical life, as the Eomaunt of the Eose is supposed to have 
been of the first. The House of Fame is in three books, com- 
prising in all 2190 lines, and is an exceedingly interesting poem 
on other accounts, as well as for the reference which Chaucer 
seems to make in it to himself, and the circumstances of his own 
life. In one place, we have an illustration drawn from a noA^elty 
which we might have thought had hardly yet become familiar 
enough for the purposes of poetry. The passage, too, is a sample 
of the wild, almost grotesque imagination, and force of expres- 
sion, for which the poem is remarkable : — 

What did this ^olus ? but he 

Took out his blacke trompe of brass, 

That fouler than the devil was, 

And gan this trompe for to blow 

As all the world should overthrow. 

Throughout every region 

Ywent this foule trompes soun, 

As swift as pellet out of gun 

When fire is in the powder run : 

And such a smoke gan out wend 

Out of the foule trompes end. 

Black, blue, and greenish, swartish, red. 

As doeth where that men melt lead, 

Lo all on high from the tewel •} 

And thereto one thing saw 1 well, 

That aye the ferther that it ran 

The greater wexeri it began, 

As doth the river from a well ; 

And it stank as the pit of hell. 



1 Funnel. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 14J 

The old mechanical artillery, however, is alluded to in another 
passage as if also still in nse : — 

And the noise which that I heard, 
For all the world right so it fered ^ 
As doth the routing ^ of the stone 
That fro the engine is letten gone. 

Through such deeper thinking and bolder writing as we have 
in the House of Fame, Chaucer appears to have advanced from the 
descriptive luxuriance of the Romaunt of the Eose to his most 
matured style in the Canterbury Tales. This is not only his 
greatest work, but it towers above all else that he has written, 
like some palace or cathedral ascending with its broad and lofty 
dimensions from among the common buildings of a city. His 
genius is another thing here altogether from what it is in his 
other writings. Elsewhere he seems at work only for the day that 
is passing over him ; here, for all time. All his poetical faculties 
put forth a strength in the Canterbury Tales they have nowhere 
else shown; not only is his knowledge of life and character greater, 
his style firmer, clearer, more flexible, and more expressive, his 
humour more subtle and various, but his fancy is more nimble- 
winged, his imagination far richer and more gorgeous, his sensi- 
bility infinitely more delicate and more profound. And this great 
work of Chaucer's is nearly as remarkably distinguished by its 
peculiar character from the great works of other poets as it is 
from the rest of his own compositions. Among ourselves at 
least, if we except Shakespeare, no other poet has yet arisen to 
rival the author of the Canterbury Tales in the entire assemblage 
of his various powers. Spenser's is a more aerial, Milton's 
a loftier song ; but neither possesses the wonderful combination 
of contrasted and almost opposite characteristics which we have in 
Chaucer : — the sportive fancy, painting and gilding everything, 
with the keen, observant, matter-of-fact spirit that looks through 
whatever it glances at ; the soaring and creative imagination, 
with the homely sagacity, and healthy relish for all the realities 
of things ; the unrivalled tenderness and pathos, with the 
quaintest humour and the most exuberant merriment ; the 
wisdom at once and the wit ; the all that is best, in short, both 
in poetry and in prose, at the same time. 

The Canterbury Tales is an unfinished, or at least, as we have 

it, an imperfect work; but it contains above 17,000 verses, 

besides more than a fourth of that quantity of matter in prose. 

The Tales (including the two in prose) are twenty-four in 

^ Fared, proceeded. 2 Koared. 



142 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

mimber; and tliey are interspersed T^dth introductions to each, 
generally short, called prologues, besides the Prologue to the 
whole work, in which the pilgrims or narrators of the tales are 
severally described, and which consists of between 800 and 900 
lines. The Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale is fully as long. 
All the twenty-four tales are complete, except only the Cook's 
Tale, of which we have only a few lines, the Squire's Tale, 
which remains " half-told," and the burlesque Tale of Sir 
Thopas, which is designedly broken off in the middle. Of the 
nineteen complete tales in verse, the longest are the Knight's 
Tale of 2250 verses, the Clerk's Tale of 1156, and the Merchant's 
Tale of 1172. The entire work, with the exception of the 
prose tales and the Kime of Sir Thopas (205 lines), is in deca- 
syllabic (or hendecasyllabic) verse, arranged either in couplets 
or in stanzas. 

The general Prologue is a gallery of pictures almost un- 
matched for their air of life and truthfulness. Here is one of 
them : — 

There was also a nun, a Prioress 
That of her smiling was fiiU simple and coy, 
Her greatest oathe u'as but by Saint Loy ;^ 
And she was cleped^ Madame Eglantine. 
Full well she sange the service divine, 
Eutuned in her nose full sweetely ; 
And French she spake full fair and fetisly ^ 
After the school of Stratford atte Bow, 
For French of Paris was to her unknow.'* 
At meate was she well ytaught withal ; 
She let no morsel from her lippes fall, 
Ne wet her fingers in her sauce deep ; 
Well could she carry a morsel and well 
Thatte no droppe ne fell upon her breast : 
In curtesy was set full much her lest.^ 
Her over-lippe wiped she so clean 
That in her cuppe was no ferthing ^ seen 
Of grease when she drunken had her draught. 
Full seemely after her meat she raught.^ 
And sickerly ^ che was of great disport. 
And full pleasant and amiable of port, 
And pained ^ her to counterfeiten cheer 
Of court, and been estatelich of manere. 



1 That is, Saint Eloy or Eligius. Oathe here, according to Mr, Guest, is the 
old genitive plural (originally atlia), meaning of oaths. 

2 Called. 3 Neatly. ^ Unknown. 
' Pleasure. ^ Smallest spot, 

7 Reached. ^ Surely. ^ Took pains. 



GEOFFKEY CHAUCER. 143 

And to been holden digne ^ of reverence 

But for to speaken of her conscience, 
She was so charitable and so pitous 
She wolde weep if that she saw a mouse 
Caught in a trap, if it were dead or bled. 
Of smale houndes had she that she fed 
With roasted flesh, and milk, and wastel bread ; 
But sore wept she if one of them were dead, 
Or if men smote it with a yerde ^ smart : 
And all was conscience and tender heart. 

Full seemely her wimple ypinche.d was ; 
Her nose tretis,^ her eyen grey as glass ; 
Her mouth full small, and thereto ^ soft and red, 
But sickerly she had a fair forehead ; 
It was almost a spanne broad, I trow ; 
For hardily '' she was not undergrow.^ 

Full fetise ^ was her cloak, as I was ware. 
Of smale coral about her arm she bare 
A pair of beades gauded all with green f 
And thereon heng 9 a brooch of gold full sheen, 
On which was first ywritten a crowned A, 
And after, Amor vincit omnia. 

As a companion to this perfect Ml length, we will add that of 
the Mendicant Friar : — 

A Frere there was, a wanton and a merry, 
A limitour,^° a full solemne man ; 
In all the orders four is none that can 
So much of dalliance and fair langage. 
He had ymade full many a marriage 
Of younge women at his owen cost ; 
Until " his order he was a noble post. 
Full well beloved and familier was he 
With franklins ^^ over all in his countree, 
And eke with worthy women of the town ; 
For he had power of confessioun. 
As said him selfe, more than a curat, 
For of his order he was a licenciat. 
Full sweetly hearde he confession. 
And pleasant was his absolution. 
He was an easy man to give penance 
There as he wist to han a good pitance ;^^ 



^ Worthy. ^ Yard, rod. ^ Long and well proportioned. 

4 In addition to that. ^ Certainly. ^ Undergrown, of a low stature. 

7 Neat. ^ Having the gauds or beads coloured green. 

^ Hung. ^^ A friar licensed to beg within a certain district. 

^^ Unto. ^2 Freeholders of the superior class. 

^^ Where he knew he should have a good pittance or fee. 



H4 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

For unto a poor order for to give 
Is signe that a man is well yshrive ;^ 
For, if he gave, he diirste make avant,^ 
He wiste that a man was repentant ; 
For many a man so hard is of his heart 
He may not weep although him sore smart ; 
Therefore, instead of weeping and prayeres, 
Men mote give silver to the poore freres. 

His tippet was aye farsed ^ full of knives 
And pinnes for to given faire wives : 
And certainly he had a merry note ; 
Well could he sing and playen on a rote.* 
Of yeddings ^ he bare utterly the pris.^ 
His neck was white as is the flower de lis ; ' 
Thereto he strong was as a champioun, 
And knew well the taverns in every town, 
And every hosteler and gay tapstere, 
Better than a lazar or a beggere ; 
For unto swich " a worthy man as he 
Accordeth nought^ as,^'* by his facultee,^^ 
To haven with sick lazars acquaintance ; 
It is not honest, it may not avance,^^ 
As ^' for to dealen with no swich poorail ^^ 
But all with rich and sellers of vitail.^^ 
And, over ^^ all, there as ^^ profit should arise, 
Curteis ^® he was, and lowly of service ; 
There n'as no man no where so virtuous ; 
He was the best beggar in all his house ; 
And gave a certain ferme ^^ for the grant 
None of his brethren came in his haunt ; 
For, though a widow hadde but a shoe, 
So pleasant was his In principio, 
Yet would he have a ferthing or he went ; 
His purchase ^'^ was well better than his rent. 
And rage he could as it had been a whelp : 
In lovedays ^^ there could he mochel ^^ help ; 
For there was he nat^^ like a cloisterere 
With threadbare cope, as is a poor scholere ; 



I Shriven. 2 Boast. ^ Stuffed. 

4 A musical instrument so called. ^ Stories, romances, ^ Prize. 

' Fleur de lis, lily. ^ Such. ^ j^ g^j^s not, is not fitting. 

^^ As in this and in other forms seems to have the efiect of merely gene- 
ralizing or giving indefiniteness to the expression. 

II Having regard to his quality or functions ? ^^ Profit. 
13 As in the fourth line preceding. ^^ Poor people. 

1 Victual. 1^ In addition to. ^^ 'Wherever. ^^ Courteous. 

-9 Farm. ^^ What he got by begging and the exercise of his profession. 

21 Days formerly appointed for the amicable settlement of differences. . 

22 Much. 23 Not. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 145 

But lie was like a maister or a pope : 
Of double worsted was his semi-cope, 
That round was as a bell out of the press.^ 
Somewhat he lisped for his wantonness, 
To make his English sweet upon his tongue ; 
And in his harping, when that he had sung, 
His eyen twinkled in his head aright, 
As don the sterres ^ in a frosty night. 
This worthy limitour, was clep'd Huberd. 

It may be observed in all these extracts how fond Chancer is 
of as it were welding one couplet and one paragraph to another, 
by allowing the sense to flow on from the last line of the one 
through the first of the other, thus producing an alternating 
movement of the sense and the sound, instead of making the one 
accompany the other, as is the general practice of our modern 
poetry. This has been noticed, and a less obvious part of the 
effect pointed out, by a poet of our own day, who has shown how 
well he felt Chaucer by something more and much better than 
criticism. " Chaucer," observes Leigh Hunt, " took the custom 
from the French poets, who have retained it to this day. It 
surely has a fine air, both of conclusion and resumption ; as 
though it would leave off when it thought proper, knowing how 
well it could recommence." * It is so favourite a usage with 
Chaucer, that it may be sometimes made available to settle the 
reading, or at least the pointing and sense of a doubtful passage. 
And it is also common with his contemporary Gower. 

The following is the first introduction to the reader of Emily, 
the heroine of the Knight's Tale of Palamon and Arcite : — 

Thus passeth year by year, and day by day, 
Till it fell ones in a morrow of May 
That Emily, that fairer was to seen 
Than is the lilly upon his stalke green, 
And fresher than the May with floures new 
(For with the rose colour strof ^ her hue ; 
I n'ot * which was the finer of them two) 
Ere it was day, as she was wont to do, 
She was arisen and all ready dight. 
For May wol have no slogardy ^ a night ; 



^ Not understood. It is the bell or the semicope that is described as out of 
the press ? ^ As do the stars. 

* Preface to Poetical Works, 8vo. Lon. T832. See also Mr. Hunt's fine 
imitation and continuation of the Squire's Tale in the Fourth Number of the 
Liberal. Lon. 1823. 

' Strove. ^ Wot not, know not. '" Sloth. 



346 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

The season pricketh. every gentle heart, 
And maketli him out of his sleep to start, 
And saith, Arise, and do thine ohservance. 

This maketh Emily han ^ remembrance 
To don honour to May, and for to rise. 
Yclothed was she fresh for to devise •? 
Her yellow hair was broided ^ in a tress 
Behind her back, a yerde long I guess ; 
And in the garden as the sun uprist ■* 
She walketh up and down where as her list :' 
She gathereth fioures partie ^ white and red 
To make a sotel ^ gerlond ^ for her head : 
And as an angel heavenlich she sung. 

Of the many other noble passages in this Tale we can only 
present a portion of the description of the Temple of Mars : — 

Why should I not as well eke tell you all 

The portraiture that was upon the wall 

Within the Temple of mighty Mars the Eed ? 

All painted was the wall in length and bred ^ 

Like to the estres '° of the grisley place 

That hight ^^ the great Temple of Mars in Trace, ^" 

In thilke ^^ cold and frosty region 

There as Mars hath his sovereign mansion. 

First on the wall was painted a forest, 
In which there wonueth i'' neither man ne beast ; 
With knotty knarry barren trees old, 
Of stubbes sharp and hidous to behold. 
In which there ran a rumble and a swough,^^ . 
As though a storm should bresten ^^ every bough ; 
And downward from an hill under a bent ^^ 
There stood the Temple of Mars Armipotent, 
Wrought all of burned ^^ steel, of which the entree 
Was long, and strait, and ghastl}^ for to see ; 
And thereout came a rage and swich a vise ^^ 
That it made all the gates for to rise. 
The northern light in at the dore shone ; 
For window on the wall jie was there none 
Through which men mighten any light discern. 
The door was all of athamant 2° etern, 



^ Have. 2 With exactness (point devise). ^ Braided. 

^ Uprises. ^ Where it pleaseth her. ^ Mixed of. 

7 Subtle, artfully contrived. ^ Garland. ^ Breadth. 

10 The interior. " Is called. 12 Thrace. 

13 That same. i4 Dwelleth. 

1' A long sighing noise, such as in Scotland is called a sugli. 

1*^ Was going to break. ^^ A declivity. ^^ Burnished. 

19 A violent blast ? 20 Adamant. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 147 

Yclenclied overthwart and endelong ^ 

With iron tougli, and, for to make it strong, 

Every pillar the temple to sustene 

Was tonne-great,^ of iron bright and shene. 

There saw I iirst the dark imagining 

Of Felony, and all the compassing ; 

The cruel Ire, red as any gied •,^ 

The Picke-purse, and eke the pale Dread ; 

The Smiler with the knife under the cloak ; 

The shepen * brenning ^ with the blake smoke ; 

The treason of the murdering in the bed ; 

The open wer,^ with woundes all bebled ; 

Contek ^ with bloody knife and sharp menace ; 

All full of chirking ^ was that sorry place. 

The sleer ^ of himself yet saw I there ; 

His hearte-blood hath bathed all his hair ; 

The nail ydriven in the shod^*' on hight ; 

The colde death, with mouth gaping upright. 

Amiddes of the Temple sat Mischance, 

With discomfort and sorry countenance : 

Yet saw I Woodness ^^ laughing in his rage. 

Armed Complaint, Outhees,^^ g^j^^ fierce Outrage ; 

The carrain ^^ in the bush, with throat ycorven ;^* 

A thousand slain, and not of qualm ystorven ;^^ 

The tyrant, with the prey by force yraft ;^^ 

The town destroyed ; — there was nothing laft.^^ 

The statue of Mars upon a carte ^^ stood 
Armed, and looked grim as he were wood ;^® 
And over his head there shinen two figures 
Of sterres, that been cleped in scriptures ^° 
That one Puella, that other Eubeus. 
This God of Armes was arrayed thus : 
A wolf there stood beforn him at his feet 
With eyen red, and of a man he eat. 

t Chaucer's merriment, at once hearty and sly, haKS of course 
the freedom and unscrupulousness of his time ; and much of the 
best of it cannot be produced in our day without oiBfence to onr 
greater sensitiveness, at least in the matter of expression. 
Besides, humour in poetry, or any other kind of writing, can 
I ^ Across and lengthways. 2 Qf the circumference of a tun. 

I ^ Burning coal. ^ Stable, ^ Burning. ^ War. 

'^ Contention. 8 Disagreeable sound. ^ Slayer. 

^° Hair of the head. 11 Madness. ^^ Outcry. 

^3 Carrion. i^ q^^^ as j^ead (starved). 

16 Keft. 17 Left. is cJar, chariot. w Mad. 

2° Stars that are called in books. 



148 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

least of all qualities be effectively exemplified in extract: its 
subtle life, dependent upon the thousand minutiae of place and 
connection, perishes under the process of excision ; it is to 
attempt to exhibit, not the building b}^ the brick, but the living 
man by a " pound of his fair flesh." We will venture, however, 
to give one or two short passages. Nothing is more admirable 
in the Canterbury Tales than the manner in which the character 
of the Host is sustained throughout. He is the moving spirit of 
the poem from first to last. Here is his first introduction to us 
presiding over the company at supper in his own 

gentle hostelry, 
That highte the Tabard faste by the Bell, 

in Southwark, on the evening before they set out on their pil- 
grimage : — 

Great clieere made our Host us everich one, 

And to the supper set he us anon. 

And served us with vitail of the best ; 

Strong was the wine, and well to drink us lest.^ 

A seemly man our Hoste was with all 

For to ban been a marshal in an haU ; 

A large man he was, with eyen steep ; 

A fairer burgess is there none in Cheap ; 

Bold of his speech, and wise, and well ytaught, 

And of manhood ylaked ^ right him naught : 

Eke th-ereto ^ was he a right merry man ; 

And after supper playen he began. 

And spake of mirth amonges other things, 

When that we hadden made our reckonings, 

And said thus : Now, Lordings, triiely 

Ye been to me welcome right heartily ; 

For, by my troth, if that I shall not lie, 

I saw nat this yer swich ^ a company 

At ones in this herberwe ^ as is now ; 

Fain would I do you mirth an I wist how ; 

And of a mirth I am right now bethought 

To don you ease, and it shall cost you nought. 

Ye gon to Canterbury ; God you speed. 

The blissful martyr quite you yoiu- meed : 

And well I wot as ye gon by the way 

Ye shapen ^ you to talken and to play ; 

For triiely comfort ne mirth is none 

To riden by the way dumb as the stone ; 

And therefore would I maken you disport. 



• It pleased us. ^ Lacked. ^ In addition, besides, also. 

* Such. ^ Inn. ^ Prepare yourselves, intend. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 149 

As I said erst, and don yon some comfort. 
And if you liketh all by one assent 
Now for to stonden ^ at my judgement, 
And for to werchen ^ as I shall you say 
To morrow, when ye riden on the way. 
Now, by my fader's soule that is dead, 
But ye be merry ^ smiteth* oif my head : 
Hold up your hondes withouten more speech. 

They all gladly assent; upon which mine Host proposes 
further that each of them (they were twenty-nine in all, besides 
himself) should tell two stories in going, and two more in 
returning, and that, when they got back to the Tabard, the one 
who had told the " tales of best sentence and most solace " should 
have a supper at the charge of the rest. And, adds the eloquent, 
sagacious, and large-hearted projector of the scheme, 

— for to make you the more merry 
I woU my selven gladly with you ride 
Eight at mine owen cost, and be your guide. 
And who that woll my judgement withsay ^ 
Shall pay for all we spenden by the way. 

Great as the extent of the poem is, therefore, what has been 
executed, or been preserved, is only a small part of the design ; 
for this liberal plan would have aiforded us no fewer than a 
hundred and twenty tales. Nothing can be better than the 
triumphant way in which mine Host of the Tabard is made to 
go through the duties of his self-assumed post; — his promptitude, 
his decision upon all emergencies, and at the same time his 
good feeling never at fault any more than his good sense, his in- 
exhaustible and unflagging fun and spirit, and the all-accom- 
modating humour and perfect sympathy with which, without for 
a moment stooping from his own frank and manly character, he 
"^jears himself to every individual of the varied cavalcade. He 
proposes that they should draw cuts to decide who was to 
begin ; and with how genuine a courtesy, at once encouraging 
and reverential, he first addresses himself to the modest Clerk, 
and the gentle Lady Prioress, and the Knight, who also was " of 
his port as meek as is a maid :" — 

Sir Knight, quod he, my maister and my lord, 
Now draweth cut, for that is mine accord. 



1 Stand. 2 Work, do. 3 if ye shall not be merry. 

^ Smite. The imperative lias generally this termination. 
^ Kesist, oppose, withstand. 



loO ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Cometli near, quod he, my Lady Prioress ; 
And ye, Sir Clerk, let be your shamefastness, 
Ne studieth nought ; lay hand to, every man. 

But for personages of another order, again, lie is another man, 
giving and taking jibe and jeer vp-ith tlie hardest and boldest in 
their own style and humour, only more nimbly and happily than 
any of them, and without ever compromising his dignity. And 
all the while his kindness of heart, simple and quick, and yet 
considerate, is as conspicuous as the cordial appreciation and 
delight with which he enters into the spirit of what is going 
forward, and enjoys the success of his scheme. For example, — 

When that the Knight had thus his tale told, 
In all the company n'as there young ne old 
That he ne said it was a noble storie, 
And worthy to be drawen to memorie,^ 
And namely ^ the gentles everich one. 
Our Hoste lough ^ and swore. So mote I gone,^ 
This goth aright ; unbokeled is the male ;^ 
Let see now who shall tell another tale, 
For triiely this game is well begonne : 
Now telleth ye. Sir Monk, if that ye conne,^ 
Somewhat to quiten with^ the Knighte's tale. 

The Miller, that for-dronken ^ was all pale, 
So that unneaths ^ upon his horse he sat. 
He n'old avalen ^^ neither hood ne hat, 
Ne abiden ^^ no man for his courtesy. 
But in Pilate's voice ^^ he gan to cry. 
And swore, By armes, and by blood and bones, 
I can '3 a noble tale for the nones, ^"^ 
With which I wol now quite the Knightes tale. 

Our Hoste saw that he was dronken of ale. 
And said, Abide, Eobin, my leve ^^ brother ; 
Some better man shall tell us first another ; 
Abide and let us werken ^^ thriftily. 

By Goddes soul, quod he, that woll not I, 
For I woll speak, or elles go my way. 

Our Host answered, Tell on a devil way ; 



1 Probably pronotinced sto^-e and me-mo-ri-e. 2 Especially. 

3 Laughed. ^ So may I fare well. ^ XJnbuckled is the budget. 

6 Can. 7 To requite. 8 "Very drunk. 

9 With difficulty. ^o Would not doff or lower. ^^ Stop for. 

12 " In such a voice as Pilate was used to speak with in the Mysteries. 
Pilate, being an odious character, was probably represented as speaking with a 
harsh disagreeable voice." — Tyrwhitt. 

^^ Know. ^'* For the nonce, for the occasion. ^^ Dear. 

1^ Go to work. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 151 

Ttiou art a fool ; thy wit is overcome. 

Now, hearkeneth, quod tlie Miller, all and some ; 

But first I make a protestatioun 

That I am drunk, I know it uj my soun, 

And therefore, if that I misspeak or say, 

Wite it ^ the ale of South wark, I you pray. 

Tlie Miller is at last allowed to tell his tale — which is more 
accordant with his character, and the condition he was in, than 
with either good morals or good manners ; — as the poet ob- 
serves : — 

What should I more say, but this Millere 
He n'old his wordes for no man forbere, 
But told his cherle's^ tale in his manere ; 
Methinketh that I shall rehearse it here : . 
And therefore every gentle wight I pray 
For Goddes love, as deem not that I say, 
Of evil intent, but that 1 mote rehearse 
Their tales all, al be they better or werse, 
Or elles falsen some of my matere : 
And, therefore, whoso list it not to hear. 
Turn over the leaf, and chese ^ another tale ; 
For he shall find enow, both great and smale, 
Of storial thing that toucheth gentiless, 
And eke morality and holiness. 

The Miller's Tale is capped by another in the same style from 
his fellow " churl " the Keve (or Bailiff) — who before he begins, 
however, avails himself of the privilege of his advanced years to 
prelude away for some time in a preaching strain, till his elo- 
quence is suddenly cut short by the voice of authority : — 

When that our Host had heard this sermoning, 
He gan to speak as lordly as a king, 
And saide. What amounteth all this wit ? 
What, shall we speak all day of holy writ ? 
The devil made a Keve for to preach, 
Or of a souter * a shipman or a leech.^ 
Say forth thy tale, and tarry not the time ; 
Lo Depeford,^ and it is half way prime ; ' 
Lo Greenewich, there many a shrew is in ;^ 
It were all time thy Tale to begin. 



1 Jjiij the blame of it on, 2 Churl's. ^ Choose. 

4 Cobbler. & Physician. ^ Deptford. 

7 Tyrwhitt supposes this means half-past seven in the morning. 
^ lu wMch (wherein) is many a shi-ew. 



152 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

The last specimen we shall give of " our Host " shall be from 
the Clerk's Prologue :— 

Sir Clerk of Oxenford, our Hoste said, 
Ye ride as still and coy as doth a maid 
Were iiewe spoused, sitting at the board ; 
This day ne heard I of your tongue a word. 
I trow ye study abouten some sophime,^ 
But Salomon saith that every thing hath time. 
For Godde's sake as heth ^ of better cheer ; 
It is no time for to stndien here. 
Tell us some merry tale by your fay ;^ 
For what man that is entered in a play 
He needes must unto the play assent. 
But preacheth not, as freres don in Lent, 
To make us for our olde sinnes weep, 
Ne that thy tale make its not to sleep. 
Tell us some merry thing of aventures ; 
Your terms, your eoloures, and your figures, 
Keep them in store till so be ye indite 
High style, as when that men to kinges write. 
Speaketh so plain at this time, I you pray, 
That we may understonden what ye say. 

This worthy Clerk benignely answerd; 
Hoste, quod he, I am under your yerde ; 
Ye have of us as now the governance, 
And therefore would I do you obeisance, 
As fer as reason asketh hardily.^ 
I wol you tell a tale which that I 
Learned at Padow of a worthy clerk, 
As preved ^ by his wordes and his werk : 
He is now dead and nailed in his chest ; 
I pray to God so yeve his soule rest. 
Francis Petrarch, the laureat poete 
Highte this clerk, whose rhethoricke sweet 
Enlumined all Itaille of poetry, 
As Linian ^ did of philosophy, 
Or law, or other art particulere ; 
But death, that wol not suffre us dwellen here 
But as it were a twinkling of an eye. 
Them both hath slain, and alle we shall die. 

And our last specimen of the Canterbury Tales, and also of 
Chaucer, being a passage exhibiting that power of pathos in the 
delicacy as well as in the depth of which he is unrivalled, shall 



Sophism, perhaps generally for a logical argument. 

Be. 3 Faith. ^ Surely. 

Proved. ^ A great lawyer of the fourteenth century. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 153 

be taken from this tale told by the Clerk, the exquisite tale of 
Griselda. Her hnsband lias carried bis trial of ber submission 
and endurance to the last point by informing ber tbat sbe must 
return to ber fatber, and that bis new wife is " coming by the 
way :"— 

And she again answerd in patience : 

My lord, quod she, I wot, and wist alway, 

How that betwixen your magnificence 

And my povert no wight ne can ne may 

Maken comparison : it is no nay : 

I ne held me never digne ^ in no manere 

To be your wife, ne yet your chamberere.^ 

And in this house there ^ ye me lady made 
(The bighe God take I for my witness, 
And all so wisly ^ he my soule glade) 
I never held me lady ne maistress, 
But humble servant to your worthiness, 
And ever shall, while that my life may dure, 
Aboven every worldly creature. 

That ye so long, of your benignity, 
Han ^ holden me in honour and nobley,'' 
Whereas '' I was not worthy for to be. 
That thank I God and you, to whom I pray 
Foryeld ^ it you : there is no more to say. 
Unto my fader gladly wol I wend. 
And with him dwell unto my lives end. 

God shield e swich a lordes wife to take 
Another man to husband or to make.^ 

And of your newe wife God of his grace 
So grant you weale and prosperity ; 
Tor I wol gladly yielden her my place, 
In which that I was blissful wont to be : 
For, sith it liketh you, my lord, quod she, 
That whilome weren all my heartes rest. 
That I shall gon, I wol go where you list. 

But, thereas ^° ye me prefer swich dowair " 
As I first brought, it is well in my mind 
It were my wretched clothes, nothing fair, 
The which to me were hard now for to find. 
goode God ! hoiu gentle and how kind 
Ye seemed hy your speech and your visage 
The day that maked was our marriage I 



' Worthy. ^ Chambermaid. ^ Where. ^ Surely. 

^ Have. ^ Nobility. 7 Where. ^ Repay. 

5 Mate. ^° Whereas. ^^ Such dower. 



154 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

But sooth is said, algate ^ I find it true, 
For in effect it preved ^ is on me, 
Love is not old as when that it is new. 
But certes. Lord, for non adversity ^ 
To dien in this case, it shall not be 
That ever in word or werk I shall repent 
That I you yave mine heart in whole intent. 

My lord, ye wot that in my fader's place 
Ye did me strip out of my poore weed. 
And richely ye clad me of your grace : 
To you brought I nought elles, out of drede,* 
But faith, and nakedness, and maidenhede ; 
And here again your clothing I restore. 
And eke your wedding ring, for evermore. 

The remnant of your jewels ready be 
Within your chamber, 1 dare it safely sayn. 
Naked out of my fader's house, quod she, 
I came, and naked I mote turn again. 
All your pleasance wold I follow fain : 
But yet I hope it be not your intent 
That I smockless out of your palace went. 



Let me not like a worm go by the way ; 
Eemember you, mine owen lord so dear, 
I was your wife, though I unworthy were. 



The smock, quod he, that thou hast on thy bake 
Let it be still, and bear it forth with thee. 
But well unneathes ^ thilke ^ word he spake. 
But went his way for ruth and for pitee. 
Before the folk herselven strippeth she, 
And in her smock, with foot and head all bare, 
Toward her father's house forth is she fare.^ 

The folk her foUowen weeping in her way, 
And Fortune aye they cursen as they gone : 
But she fro weeping kept her eyen drey,^ 
Ne in this time word ne spake she none. 
Her fader, that this tiding heard anon, 
Curseth the day and time that nature 
Shope him ^ to been a lives ^° creature. 



^ In every way. ^ Proved. 

3 For no unhappiness that may be my lot, were it even to die ? 

4 Doubt. ^ With great difficulty. ^ This same. 

7 Gone. ^ Dry. ^ Formed. lo Living. 



I 



JOHN GOWER. 155 

There is scarcely perhaps to be fouDd anywhere in poetry a 
finer burst of natural feeling than in the lines we have printed 
in italics. 

John Gower. 

Contemporary with Chaucer, and probably born a few years 
earlier, though of the two he survived to the latest date, for his 
death did not take place till the year 1408, was John Gower. 
Moral Gower, as he is commonly designated, is the author of three 
great poetical works (sometimes spoken of as one, though they 
do not seem to have had any connection of plan or subject) : — the 
Speculum Meditantis, which is, or was, in French ; the Vox 
Clamantis, which is in Latin ; and the Confessio Amantis, 
which is in English. But the first, although an account of it, 
founded on a mistake, has been given by Warton, has certainly 
not been seen in modern times, and has in all probability perished. 
The Vox Clamantis was edited for the Eoxburghe Club in 
1850 by the Rev. H. G. Coxe. It consists of seven Books in 
Latin elegiacs. " The greater bulk of the work," says Dr. Pauli, 
" the date of which its editor is inclined to fix between 1382 
and 1384, is rather a moral than an historical essay ; but the 
First Book describes the insurrection of Wat Tyler in an alle- 
gorical disguise; the poet having a dream on the 11th of June 
1381, in which men assumed the shape of animals. The Second 
Book contains a long sermon on fatalism, in which the poet 
shows himself no friend to Wiclif 's tenets, but a zealous advo- 
cate for the reformation of the clergy. The Third Book points 
out how all orders of society must suffer for their own vices and 
demerits ; in illustration of which he cites the example of the 
secular clergy. The Fourth Book is dedicated to the cloistered 
clergy and the friars, the Fifth to the military ; the Sixth 
contains a violent attack on the lawyers ; and the Seventh 
subjoins the moral of the whole, represented in Nebuchadnezzar's 
dream, as interpreted by Daniel." * The allusion in the title 
seems to be to St. John the Baptist, and to the general clamour 
then abroad in the country. The Confessio Amantis has been 
several times printed; — by Caxton in 1483, by Berthelet in 1532 
and again in 1554; and by Alexander Chalmers in the second 
volume of his English poets, 1810; but all these previous edi- 
tions have been superseded by the very commodious and beautiful 
one of Dr. Reinhold Pauli, in 3 vols. 8vo., London, 1857. 

We will avail ourselves of Dr. Pauli's account of the course in 
* Introd. Essay to Confessio Amantis. 



156 ENGLISH LITEEATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

which the work proceeds : — " The poem opens by introducing 
the author himself, in the character of an unhappy lover in 
despair. Venus appears to him, and, after having heard his 
prayer, appoints her priest called Genius, like the mystagogue in 
the picture of Cebes, to hear the lover's confession. This is the 
frame of the whole work, which is a singular mixture of classical 
notions, principally borrowed from Ovid's Ars Amandi, and 
of the purely medieval idea, that as a good Catholic the unfor- 
tunate lover must state his distress to a father confessor. This 
is done with great regularity and even pedantry : all the 
passions of the human heart, which generally stand in the way 
of love, being systematically arranged in the various books and 
subdivisions of the work. After Genius has fully explained the 
evil affection, passion, or vice under consideration, the lover 
confesses on that particular point; and frequently urges his 
boundless love for an unknown beauty, who treats him cruelly, 
in a tone of affectation which would appear highly ridiculous in a 
man of more than sixty years of age, were it not a common 
characteristic of the poetry of the period. After this profession 
the confessor opposes him, and exemplifies the fatal effects of 
each passion by a variety of opposite stories, gathered from 
many sources, examples being then, as now, a favourite mode of 
inculcating instruction and reformation. At length, after a 
frequent and tedious recurrence of the same process, the con- 
fession is terminated by some final injunctions of the priest — 
the lover's petition in a strophic poem addressed to Venus — the 
bitter judgment of the goddess, that he should remember his old 
age and leave off such fooleries .... his cure from the wound 
caused by the dart of love, and his absolution, received as if by 
a pious Eoman Catholic." * 

Such a scheme as this, pursued through more than thirty thou- 
sand verses, promises perhaps more edification than entertain- 
ment ; but the amount of either that is to be got out of the Con- 
fessio Amantis is not considerable. Ellis, after charitably 
declaring that so long as Moral Gower keeps to his morality he 
is " wise, impressive, and sometimes almost sublime," is com- 
pelled to add, " But his narrative is often quite petrifying ; and, 
when we read in his work the tales with which we had been 
familiarized in the poems of Ovid, we feel a mixture of surprise 
and despair at the perverse industry employed in removing every 
detail on which the imagination had been accustomed to fasten. 
The author of the Metamorphoses was a poet, and at least suffi- 
ciently fond of ornament ; Gower considers him as a mere 
* Introductory Essay, p. xxxiv. 



BARBOUR. 157 

annalist ; scrapnlously preserves his facts ; relates them with 
great perspicuity ; and is fully satisfied when he has extracted 
from them as much morality as they can be reasonably expected 
to furnish."* In many cases this must be little enough. 



Barbour. 

This latter part of the fourteenth century is also the age of the 
birth of Scottish poetry ; and Chaucer had in that dialect a far 
more worthy contemporary and rival than his friend and fellow- 
Englishman Gower, in John Barbour. Of Barbour's personal 
history but little is known. He was a churchman, and had at- 
tained to the dignity of Archdeacon of Aberdeen by the year 
1357 ; so that his birth cannot well be supposed to have been 
later than 1320. He is styled Archdeacon of Aberdeen in a 
passpoi-t granted to him in that year by Edward III. at the 
request of David de Bruce (that is, King Havid II. of Scotland), 
to come into England with three scholars in his company, for 
the purpose, as it is expressed, of studying in the University of 
Oxford ; and the protection is extended to him and his com- 
panions while perfonning their scholastic exercises, and generally 
while remaining there, and also while returning to their own 
country. It may seem strange that an Archdeacon should go to 
college ; but Oxford appears to have been not the only seat of 
learning to which Barbour resorted late in life with the same 
object. Three other passports, or safe- conducts, are extant 
which were granted to him by Edward at later dates : — the first, 
in 1364r, permitting him to come, with four horsemen, from, 
Scotland, by land or sea, into England, to study at Oxford, or 
elsewhere, as he might think proper; the second, in 1365, by 
which he is authorized to come into England, and travel through- 
out that kingdom, with six horsemen as his companions, as far as 
to St. Denis in France ; and the third, in 1368, securing him 
protection in coming, with two valets and two horses, into 
England, and travelling through the same to the king's other 
dominions, on his way to France (versus Franciam) for the pur- 
pose of studying there, and in returning thence. Yet he had 
also been long before this employed, and in a high capacity, in 
civil affairs. In 1357 he was appointed by the Bishop of Aber- 
deen one of his two Commissioners deputed to attend a meeting 
at Edinburgh about the ransom of the king, Nothing more is 
heard of him till 1373, in which year he appears as one of the 

* Specimens of the Early English Poets, i. 179. 



158 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

auditors of Exchequer, being styled Archdeacon of Aberdeen, 
and clerk of probation {clerico prohacionis) of the royal household. 
In his later days he appears to have been in the receipt of two 
royal pensions, both probably bestowed upon him by Eobert II,, 
who succeeded David II. in 1370; the first one of 10?. Scots 
from the customs of Aberdeen, the other one of 205. from the 
borough mails, or city rents, of the same town. An entry in the 
records of Aberdeen for 1471 states on the authority of the 
original roll, now lost, that the latter was expressly granted to 
him " for the compilation of the book of the Acts of King Eobert 
the First," In a passage occurring in the latter part of this work, 
he himself tells us that he was then compiling it in the year 1375. 
All that is further known of him is, that his death took place 
towards the close of 1395. Besides his poem commonly called 
The Bruce, another metrical work of his entitled The Broite or 
The Brute, being a deduction of the history of the Scottish kings 
from Brutus, is frequently referred to by the chronicler Wynton 
in the next age ; but no copy of it is now believed to exist. Of 
the Bruce the first critical edition was that by Pinkerton, pub- 
lished in 3 vols. 8vo. at London in 1790 ; the last and best, is 
that by the Kev. Dr. John Jamieson, forming the first volume of 
The Bruce and Wallace, 2 vols, 4to. Edinburgh, 1820. 

The Scotch in which Barbour's poem is written was undoubt- 
edly the language then commonly in use among his countrymen, 
for whom he wrote and with whom his poem has been a popular 
favourite ever since its first appearance. By his countr^^men, of 
course, we mean the inhabitants of southern and eastern, or 
Lowland Scotland, not the Celts or Llighlanders, who have always 
'been and still are as entirely distinct a race as the native Irish 
are, and always have been, from the English in Ireland, and to 
confound whom either in language or in any other respect with 
the Scottish Lowlanders is the same sort of mistake that it would 
be to speak of the English as being either in language or lineage 
identical with the Welsh. Indeed, there is a remarkable simi- 
larity as to this matter in the circumstances of the three coun- 
tries : in each a primitive Celtic population, which appears t-o 
have formerly occupied the whole soil, has been partially ex- 
pelled by another race, but still exists, inhabiting its separate 
locality (in all the three cases the maritime and mountainous 
wilds of the west), and retaining its own ancient and perfectly 
distinct language. The expulsion has been the most sweeping 
in England, where it took place first, and where the Welsh form 
now only about a sixteenth of the general population ; it has 
been carried to a less extent in Scotland, where it was not 



BARBOUR. 159 

effected till a later age, and where the numbers of the High- 
landers are still to those of the Lowlanders in the proportion of 
one to five or six ; in Ireland, where it happened last of all, the 
new settlers have scarcely yet ceased to be regarded as foreigners 
and intruders, and the ancient Celtic inhabitants, still covering, 
although not possessing, by far the greater part of the soil, the 
larger proportion of them, however, having relinquished their 
ancestral speech, continue to be perhaps six or eight times as 
numerous as the Saxons or English. For in all the three cases it 
is the same Saxon, or at least Teutonic, race before which the Celts 
have retired or given way : the "Welsh, the Scottish Highlanders, 
and the native Irish, indeed, all to this day alike designate the 
stranger who has set himself down beside them by the common 
epithet of the Saxon. We know that other Teutonic or northern 
races were mixed with the Angles and Saxons in all the three 
cases : not only were the English, who settled in Scotland in 
great numbers, and conquered Ireland, in the eleventh and 
twelfth centuries, in part French Normans, but the original 
Normans or Danes had in the eighth and ninth centuries 
effected extensive settlements in each of the three countries. 
Besides, the original English were themselves a mixed people ; 
and those of them who were distinctively Saxons were even 
the old hereditary enemies of the Danes. Still, as the Saxons, 
Angles, and Jutes were as one people against the Scandi- 
navian Danes, or their descendants the French Normans, so 
even Saxons and Danes, or Normans, were united everywhere 
against the Celts. As for the language spoken by the Lowland 
Scots in the time of Barbour, it must have sprung out of the 
same sources, and been affected by nearly the same influences, 
with the English of the same age. Nobody now holds that any 
part of it can have been derived from the Picts, who indeed 
originally occupied part of the Lowlands of Scotland, but who 
were certainly not a Teutonic but a Celtic people. Lothian, or 
all the eastern part of Scotland to the south of the Forth, was 
English from the seventh century, as much as was Northumber- 
land or Yorkshire : from this date the only difference that could 
have distinguished the language there used from that spoken in 
the south of England was probably a larger infusion of the 
Danish forms ; but this characteristic must have been shared in 
nearly the same degree by all the English then spoken to the 
north of the Thames. Again, whatever effect may have been 
produced by the Norman Conquest, and the events consequent 
upon that revolution, would probably be pretty equally diffused 
over the two countries. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 



160 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND. LANGUAGE. 

botli the Normans themselves and their literature appear to have 
acquired almost the same establishment and ascendancy in Scot- 
land as in England. We have seen that French was the lan- 
guage of the court in the one country as well as in the other, and 
that Scottish as well as English writers figure among the imi- 
tators of the Norman trouveurs and romance poets. Afterwards 
the connexion of Scotland with France became much more inti- 
mate and uninterrupted than that of England ; and this appears 
to have affected the Scottish dialect in a way which will be 
presently noticed. But in Barbour's day, the language of 
I'eutonic Scotland was distinguished from that of the south of 
England (which had now acquired the ascendancy over that of 
the northern counties as the literary dialect), by little more than 
the retention, perhaps, of a good many vocables which had be- 
come obsolete among the English, and a generally broader enun- 
ciation of the vowel sounds. Hence Barbour never supposes 
that he is writing in any other language than English any more 
than Chaucer ; that is the name by which not only he, but his 
successors Dunbar and even Lyndsay, always designate their 
native tongue : down to the latter part of the sixteenth century, 
by the term Scotch was generally understood what is now called 
the Gaelic, or tbe Erse or Ersh (that is, Irish), the speech of the 
Celts or Highlanders. Divested of the grotesque and cumbrous 
spelling of the old manuscripts, the language of Barbour is quite 
as intelligible at the present day to an EDglish reader as that of 
Chaucer ; the obsolete words and forms are not more numerous 
in the one writer than in the other, though some that are used 
by Barbour may not be found in Chaucer, as many of Chaucer's 
are not in Barbour ; the chief general distinction, as we have 
said, is the greater breadth given to the vowel sounds in the 
dialect of the Scottish poet. The old termination of the present 
participle in and is also more frequently used than in Chaucer, 
to whom however it is not unknown, any more than its modern 
substitute ing is to Barbour. The most remarkable peculiarity of 
the more recent form of the Scottish dialect that is not found in 
Barbour is the abstraction of the final I from syllables ending in 
that consonant preceded by a vowel or diphthong : thus he never 
has a\ fa', fa or fou\ pow, how, for all, fall, full, poll, hole, &c. The 
subsequent introduction of this habit into the speech of the 
Scotch is perhaps to be attributed to their imitation of the lique- 
faction of the I in similar circumstances by the French, from 
whom they have also borrowed a considerable number of their 
modern vocables, never used in England, and to whose accentu- 
ation, both of individual words and of sentences, theirs has 



BARBOUR. 161 

much general resemblance, throwing the emphasis, contrary, as 
already noticed, to the tendency of the English language, upon 
one of the latter syllables, and also running into the rising in 
many cases where the English use the falling intonation. 

The Bruce is a very long poem, comprising between twelve and 
thirteen thousand lines, in octosyllabic metre, which ihe two 
last editors have distributed, Pinkerton into twenty, Jamieson 
into fourteen, Books. It relates the history of Scotland, and 
especially the fortunes of the great Bruce, from the death of 
Alexander III. in 1286, or rather, from the competition for the 
crown, and the announcement of the claims of Edward I. as lord 
paramount, on that of his daughter, Margaret the Maiden of 
Norway, in 1290 — the events of the first fifteen or sixteen years, 
however, before Bruce comes upon the stage, being very suc- 
cinctly given — to the death of Bruce (Eobert I.) in 1329, and 
that of his constant associate and brother of chivalry. Lord 
James Douglas, the bearer of the king's heart to the Holy Land, 
in the year following. The 12,500 verses, or thereby, may be 
said therefore to comprehend the events of about twenty-five 
years ; and Barbour, though he calls his work a " romaimt," as' 
being a narrative poem, professes to relate nothing but what ho 
believed to be the truth, so that he is to be regarded not only as 
the earliest poet but also as the earliest historian of his country. 
Fordun, indeed, was his contemporary, but the Latin chronicle 
of that writer was probably not published till manj^ years after 
his death. And to a great extent Barbour's work is and has 
always been regarded as being an authentic historical monu- 
ment ; it has no doubt some incidents or embellishments which 
may be set down as fabulous ; but these are in general very 
easily distinguished from the main texture of the narrative, 
which agrees substantially with the most trustworthy accounts 
drawn from other sources, and has been received and quoted as 
^good evidence by all subsequent writers and investigators of 
Scottish history, from Andrew of Wynton to Lord Hailes inclu- 
rsive. 

Barbour is far from beinw- a poet equal to Chaucer ; but there 
is no other English poet down to a centurj^ and a half after their 
day who can be placed by the side of the one any more than of 
the other. He has neither Chaucer's delicate feeling of the beau- 
tiful, nor his grand inventive imagination, nor his wit oi 
humour ; but in mere narrative and description he is, with his 
clear, strong, direct diction, in a high degree both animated and 
picturesque, and his poem is pervaded by a glow of generous 
sentiment, well befitting its subject, and lending grace as well as 

M 



162 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

additional force to tlie ardent, bounding spirit of life with which 
it is instinct from beginning to end. The following passage, 
which occurs near the commencement, has been often quoted (at 
least in part) ; but it is too remarkable to be omitted in any 
exemplification of the characteristics of Barbour's poetry. He is 
describing the oppressions endured by the Scots during the occu- 
pation of their country by the English king, Edward L, after his 
deposition of his puppet Baliol : — 

And gif that ony man them by 

Had ony thing that wes worthy, 

As horse, or hund, or other thing. 

That war pleasand to their liking ! 

With right or ^vrang it wald have they. 

And gif ony wald them withsay. 

The}'' suld swa do, that they siild tine^ 

Other^ land or life, or live in pine. 

For they dempt^ them efter their will, 

Takand na kepe^ to right na skill .^ 

Ah ! what they dempt them felonly !^ . 

For gud knightes that war worthy, 

For little enchesoun^ or then^ nana 

They hangit be the neckbane. 

Als^ that folk, that ever was free, 

And in freedom wont for to be, 

Through their great mischance and folly, 

Wor treated then sa wickedly, 

That their faes^° their judges ware : 

What wretchedness may man have mair ? -^ 

Ah ! Freedom is a noble thing ! 
Freedom mays'^ man to have liking ;^3 
Freedom all solace to man gives : 
He lives at ease that freely lives ! 
A noble heart may have nane ease, 
Ne elles nought that may him please 
Giff freedom failye : for free liking 
Is yarnit" ower^* all other thing. 
Na he that aye has livit free 
May nought knaw well the property ,i^ 



' Lose. 2 Either. =* Doomed, judged. 

■* Taking no heed, paying no regard. ^ ■ Reason. 

** Ah ! how cruelly tliey judged them ! 7 Cause. 

8 Both the sense and the metre seem to require that tins then (in orig. than) 
sliould be transferred to the next line; " they hangit then." 

9 Also, thus. '0 Foes. " More. ^^ Makes. 
'^ Pleasure. i* Yearned for, desired. ^^ Over, above. 
i<5 Tlje quality, the peculiar state or condition ? 



BARBOUR. 163 

The anger, na the wretched doom, 
That is couplit^ to foul thirldoom.^ 
But gif he had assayit it, 
Then all perquer^ he suld it wit ; 
And suld think fneedom mair to prise 
Than all the gold in warld that is. 

It is, he goes on to observe, by its contrary, or opposite, that 
the trae nature of everything is best discovered : — the value and 
blessing of freedom, for example, are only to be fully felt in 
slavery ; and then the worthy archdeacon, who, although the 
humorous is not his strongest ground, does not want slyness or a 
sense of the comic, winds up with a very singular illustration, 
which, however, is more suited to his own age than to ours, and 
may be suppressed here without injury to the argument. 

But Barbour's design, no doubt, was to effect by means of this 
light and sportive conclusion an easy and harmonious descent 
from the height of declamation and passion to which he had been 
carried in the preceding lines. Throughout his long work he 
shows, for his time, a very remarkable feeling of the art of 
poetry, both by the variety which he studies in the disposition 
and treatment of his subject, and by the rare temperance and 
self-restraint which prevents him from ever overdoing what he is 
about either by prosing or raving. Even his patriotism, warm 
and steady as it is, is wholly without any vulgar narrowness or 
ferocity : he paints the injuries of his country with distinctness 
and force, and celebrates the heroism of her champions and 
deliverers with all admiration and sympathy ; but he never runs 
into either the gasconading exaggerations or the furious depre- 
ciatory invectives which would, it might be thought, have better 
pleased the generality of those for whom he wrote. His under- 
standing was too enlightened, and his heart too large, for that. 
His poem stands in this respect in striking contrast to that of 
Harry, the blind minstrel, on the exploits of Wallace, to be 
afterwards noticed ; but each poet suited his hero — Barbour, the 
magnanimous, considerate, and far-seeing king ; Blind Harry, 
the indomitable popular champion, with his one passion and 
principle, hatred of the domination of England, occupying his 
whole soul and being. 

* Coiipled, attached. 2 Thraldom. ^ Exactly. 



164 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Compound English Prose. — Mandevil; The vis a ; Wiclif; 
Chaucer. 

To the fourteenth century belong the earliest specimens of 
prose composition in our present mixed English that have been 
preserved. 

Our oldest Mixed English prose author is Sir John Mandevil, 
whose Yoyages and Travels, a singular repertory of the marvellous 
legends of the middle ages, have been often printed. The best 
editions are that published in 8vo., at London, in 1725, and the 
reprint of it in the same form in 1839, " with an introduction, 
additional notes, and a glossary, by J. 0. Halliwell, Esq., F.S.A., 
E.E.A.S." The author's own account of himself and of his book 
is given in an introductory address, or Prologue : — 

And, for als mocli as it is long time passed that there was no general 
passage ne vyage over the sea, and many men desiren for to hear speak of 
the Holy Lond, and han ^ thereof great solace and comfort, I, John Maun- 
deville, knight, all he it I be not worthy, that was born in Englond, in the 
town of Saint Albons, passed the sea in the year of our Lord Jesu Christ 
1322, in the day of Saint Michel ; and hider-to have ben 2 longtime over 
the sea, and have seen and gone thorough many divers londs, and many 
provinces, and kingdoms, and isles, and have passed thorough Tartary, 
Persie, Ermonie 3 the Little and the Great ; thorough Libye, Chaldee, and 
a great part of Ethiop ; thorough Amazoyn, Ind the Lass and the More, a 
great party ; and thorough out many other isles, that ben abouten Ind ; 
where dwellen many divers folks, and of divers manners and laws, and of 
divers shapps of men. Of which londs and isles 1 shall speak more plainly 
hereafter. And I shall devise yon some party of things that there ben,^ 
whan time shall ben after it may best come to my mind ; and specially 
for hem^ that will® and are in purpose for to visit the Holy City of 
Jerusalem, and the holy places that are thereabout. And I shall tell the 
way that they should holden thider. For I have often times passed and 
ridden the way, with good company of many lords, God be thonked. 

And ye shull understond that I have put this book out of Latin into 
French, and translated it agen out of French into English, that every 
man of my nation may understond it. But lords and knights, and other 
noble and worthy men, that con '' Latin but little, and han ben beyond 
the sea, knowen and understonden gif I err in devising, for forgetting or 
else ; that they mowc ^ redress it and amend it. For things passed out, 
of long time, from a man's mind, or from his sight, turnen soon into for- 
getting ; because that mind of man ne may not ben comprehended ne 
withholden for the freelty of mankind. 



1 Have. 2 Been. ^ Armenia. ■* Be. 

5 Them ('em). ^ ^yigi^^ 7 Know. ^ May. 



MANDEVIL. 165 

Mandevil is said to have returned to England in 1356, or after 
an absence of thirty-four years ; and, as he is recorded to have 
died at Liege in 1371, his book must have been written early in 
the latter half of the fourteenth century. 

The oldest English translation we have of the Bible is that of 
Wiclif. John de VViclif, or Wj^cliffe, died at about the age of sixty 
in 1384, and his translation of the Scriptures from the Vulgate 
appears to have been finished two or three years before. The 
New Testament has been several times printed ; first in folio in 
1731 under the care of the Kev. John Lewis ; next in 4to. in 
1810 under that of the Eev. H. H. Baber ; lastly in 4to. in 1841, 
and again in 1846, in Bagster's English Hexapla. And now the 
Old Testament has also been given to the world from the 
Clarendon press, at the expense of the University of Oxford, 
admirably edited by the liev. J. Eorshall and Sir Frederick 
Madden, in four magnificent quartos, Oxford, 1850. Wiclif is also 
the author of many original writings in his native language, in 
defence of his reforming views in theology and church govern- 
ment, some of which have been printed, but most of which that 
are preserved still remain in manuscript. His style is every- 
where coarse and slovenly, though sometimes animated by a 
popular force or boldness of expression. 

Chaucer is the author of three separate works in prose ; a 
translation of Boethius de Consolatione Philosophise, printed by 
Caxton, in folio, without date, under the title of The Boke of 
Consolacion of Philosophic, wich that Boecius made for his 
Comforte and Consolacion ; a Treatise on the Astrolabe, ad- 
dressed to his son Lewis, in 1391, and printed (at least in part) 
in the earlier editions of his works ; and The Testament of Love, 
an apparent imitation of the treatise of Boethius, written towards 
the end of his life, and also printed in the old editions of his col- 
lected works. But, perhaps, the. most highly finished, and in 
other respects also the most interesting, of the great poet's prose 
compositions are the Tale of Meliboeus and the Parson's Tale, 
in the Canterbury Tales. The Parson's Tale, which winds up 
the Canterbury Tales, as we possess the work, is a long moral 
discourse, which, for the greater part, is not very entertaining, 
but which yet contains some passages curiously illustrative of 
the age in which it was written. Here is part of what occurs in 
the section headed De Superbia (Of Pride), the first of the seven 
mortal sins. Tyrwhitt justly recommends that the whole 
" should be read carefully by any antiquary who may mean 
to write De re Vestiaria of the English nation in the fourteenth 
century." 



166 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Now ben there two manner of prides : that on of hem ^ is within the 
heart of a man, and that other is without ; of which soothly these foresaid 
things, and mo^ than I have said, appertainen to pride that is within 
the heart of man. And there he other spices ^ that ben withonten ; but, 
natheless, that on of these spices of pride is sign of that other, right as the 
gay levesell ^ at the tavern is sign of the wine that is in the cellar. And 
this is in many things, as in speech and countenance, and outrageous 
array of clothing ; for certes if there had ben no sin in clothing Christ wold 
not so soon have noted and spoken of the clothing of thilk rich man in the 
Grospel : and, as Saint Gregory saith, that precious clothing is culpable, 
for the dearth of it, and for his softness, and for his strangeness and 
disguising, and for the superfluity or for the inordinate scantiness of it. 
Alas ! may not a man see as in our days the sinful costlew array of clothing, 
and namely ^ in too much superfluity, or else in too disordinate scantness. 

As to the first sin, in superfluity of clothing, which that maketh it so 
dear, to the harm of the people, not only the cost of the embrouding,^ 
the disguising, indenting or barring, ownding,^ paling,^ winding, or 
bending, and semblable waste of cloth in vanity ; but there is also the 
costlew furring in hir gowns, so mocli pounsoning ^ of chisel to maken 
holes, so moch dagging^" of shears, with the superfluity in length of the 
foresaid gowns, trailing in the dong and in the mire, on horse and eke on 
foot, as well of man as of woman, that all thilk training is verily (as in 
effect) wasted, consumed, threadbare, and rotten with dong, rather than it 
is yeven to the poor, to great damage of the foresaid poor folk, and that in 
sondry wise ; this is to sayn, the more that cloth is wasted, the more must 
it cost to the poor people, for the scarceness ; and, furthermore, if so be 
that they wolden yeve swich pounsoned and dagged clothing to the poor 
people, it is not convenient to wear for hir estate, ne suffisant to bote" hir 
necessity, to keep hem fro the distemperance of the firmament. . . . 

Also the sin of ornament or of apparel is in things that appertain to 
riding, as in too many delicate horse that ben holden for delight, that ben 
so fair, fat, and costlew ; and also in many a vicious knave that is sus- 
tained because of hem ; in curious harness, as in saddles, croppers, peitrels, 
and bridles, covered with precious cloth and rich, barred and plated of 
gold and of silver ; for which God saith by Zachary the prophet, I wol 
confound the riders of swich horse. * These folk taken little regard of the 
riding of God's son of heaven, and of his harness, whan he rode upon the 
ass, and had none other harness but the poor clothes of his disciples, ne we 
read not that ever he rode on ony other beast. I speak this for the sin of 
: u|:erfluity, and not for honesty whan reason it requireth. And, moreover. 



1 The one of them. _ 2 More. 3 Species, kinds. 

■* The meaning of this word, which at a later date appears to have been 
pronounced and written lessel, is unknown. See Tyrwhitt's note to Cant. 
Tales, V. 4059, and Glossary, ad verhum ; and note by the editor, Mr. Albert 
Way, on pp. 300, 301, of tlie Promptorium Parvulorum, vol. 1., printed for 
the Camden Society, 4to. Lond. 1843. ^ Especially. 

6 Embroidering. ^ Imitating waves. § Imitating pales. 

9 Punching. ^^ Shtting. n Help (boot). 



PRINTING IN ENGLAND. 167 

certes pride is greatly notified in holding of great meiny,- whan tliey ben 
of little profit, or of right no profit, and namely whan that meiny is 
felonious and damageous to the people by hardiness of high lordship, or by 
way of office ; for certes swich lords sell than hir lordship to the devil of 
hell, whan they sustain the wickedness of hir meiny ; or else whan these 
folk of low degree, as they that holden hostelries, sustainen theft of liir 
hostellers, and that is in many manner of deceits ; thilk manner of folk 
ben the flies that followen the honey, or else the hounds that followen the 
carrain ; swich foresaid folk stranglen spiritually hir lordships ; for which 
thus saith David the prophet, Wicked death mot come unto thilk lord- 
ships, and God yeve that they mot descend into hell all down, for in hir 
houses is iniquity and shrewedness, and not God of heaven : and certes, 
but if they done amendment, right as God yave his benison to Laban by 
the service of Jacob, and to Pharaoh by the service of Joseph, right so wol 
God yeve his malison to swich lordships as sustain the wickedness of hir 
servants, but they come to amendment. Pride of the table appeareth 
eke full oft ; for certes rich men be cleped ^ to feasts, and poor folk be put 
away and rebuked; and also in excess of divers meats and drinks, and 
namely swich manner bake meats and dish meats brenning ^ of wild fire, 
and painted and castled with paper, and semblable waste, so that it is 
abusion to think ; and eke in too great preciousness of vessel, and curiosity 
of minstrelsy, by which a man is stirred more to the delights of luxury. 



Peintixg in England. — Caxton. 



The art of printing had been practised nearly thirty years in 
Germany before it was introduced either into England or France 
— with so tardy a pace did knowledge travel to and fro over the 
earth in those days, or so unfavourable was the state of these 
countries for the reception of even the greatest improvements in 
the arts. At lengi;h a citizen of London secured a conspicuous 
place to his name for eA^'er in the annals of our national literature, 
by being, so far as is known, the first of his countrymen that 
learned the new art, and certainly the first who either practised 
it in England, or in printing an English book. William Caxton 
Avas born, as he tells us himself, in the A\'eald of Kent, it is sup- 
posed about the year 1412. Thirty years after this date his 
name is found among the members of the Mercers' Company in 
London. Later in life he appears to have repeatedly visited the 
Low Countries, at first probably on business of his own, but 
afterwards in a sort of public capacity, — having in 1464 been 
commissioned, along with another person, apparently also a mei> 
chant, by Edward IV. to negotiate a commei-cial treaty with the 
Duke of Burgundy. He was afterwards taken into the house- 
I Body of menials. ^ Called, invited. ^ Burning. 



168 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

hold of Margaret Duchess of Burgundy. It was probably while 
resident abroad, in the Low Countries or in Germany, that he 
commenced practising the art of printing. He is commonly 
supposed to have completed before the end of the year 1471 
impressions of Eaoul le Fevre's Eecueil des Histoires de Troves, 
in folio ; of the Latin oration of John Russell on Charles Duke 
of Burgundy being created a Knight of the Garter, in quai-to ; 
and of an English translation by himself of Le Fevre's above- 
mentioned history, in folio ; " whyche sayd translacion and 
werke," says the title, " was begonne in Brugis in 1468, and 
ended in the holy cyte of Colen, 19 Sept. 1471." But these 
words undoubtedly refer only to the translation ; and sufficient 
reasons have lately been advanced by Mr. Knight for enter- 
taining the strongest doubts of any one of the above-mentioned 
books having been printed by Caxton.* The earliest work now 
known, which we have sufficient grounds for believing to have 
been printed by Caxton, is another English translation by him- 
self, from the French, of a moral treatise entitled The Game and 
Playe of the Chesse, a folio volume, which is stated to have been 
" finished the last day of March, 1474." It is generally sup- 
posed that this work was printed in England ; and the year 1474 
accordingly is assumed to have been that of the introduction of 
the art into this country. It is certainly known that Caxton 
was resident in England in 1477, and had set up his press in the 
Almonry, near Westminster Abbey, where he printed that year, 
in folio. The Dictes and Notable Wyse Sayenges of the Phylo- 
sophers, translated from the French by Anthony Woodville, Earl 
Eivers. From this time Caxton continued both to print and 
translate with indefatigable industry for about a dozen years, his 
last publication with a date having been produced in 1490, and 
his death having probably taken place in 1491, or 1492. Before 
he died he saw the admirable art which he had introduced into 
his native country already firmly established there, and the 
practice of it extensively diffused. Theodore Eood, John Lettow, 
William Machelina, and Wynkyn de Worde, foreigners, and 
Thomas Hunt, an Englishman, all printed in London both before 
and after Caxton's death. It is probable that the foreigners had 
been his assistants, and were brought into the country by him. 
A press was also set up at St. Albans by a schoolmaster of that 
place, whose name has not been preserved ; and books began to 
be printed at Oxford so early as the year 1478. 

* See "William Caxton, a Biography, 12mo. Lond. 1844, pp. 103, &c. 
This work lias since been expanded into The Old Printer and the Modern 
Press, 8vo. 1854. 



BISHOP PECOCK. 169 

English Cheoxiclees. 

The series of our Modern English chronicles may perhaps he 
most properly considered as commencing with John de Trevisa's 
translation of Higden, with Tarious additions, which, as already 
mentioned, was finished in 1387, and was printed, with a con- 
tinuation to 1460, by Caxton, in 1482. After Trevisa comes 
John Harding, w^ho belongs to the fifteenth centuiy ; his metrical 
Chronicle of England coming down to the reign of Edward lY.* 
The metre is melancholy enough ; but the part of the work 
relating to the author's own times is not without value. Hardiug 
is chiefly notorious as the author, or at least the collector and 
producer, of a great number of charters and other documents 
attesting acts of fealty done by the Scottish to the English kings, 
which are now generally admitted to be forgeries. Caxton 
himself must be reckoned our next English chronicler, as the 
author both of the continuation of Trevisa and also of the con- 
cluding part of the volume entitled The Chronicles of England, 
published by him in 1480, — the body of which is translated from 
a Latin chronicle by Douglas, a monk of Glastonbury, who lived 
in the preceding century. Neither of these performances, how- 
ever, is calculated to add to the fame of the celebrated printer. 
To this period we may also in part assign the better known 
Concordance of Histories of Eobert Fabyan, citizen and draper 
of London; though the author only died in 1512, nor was his 
work printed till a few years later. Fabyan's history, which 
begins with Brutus and comes down to his own time, is in the 
greater part merely a translation from the preceding chroniclers ; 
its chief value consists in a number of notices it has preserved 
relating to the city of London.* 



Bishop Pecock; Fortescue; Malory. 

Of the English theological writers of the age immediately 
following that of \\'iclif, the most noteworthy is Eeynold 
Pecock, Bishop of Asaph and afterwards of Chichester. As may 
be inferred from these ecclesiastical dignities, Pecock Was no 
Wiclifite, but a defender of the established system both of doc- 
trine and of church government : he tells us himself, in one of his 

* First printed by Grafton in 1543. The most recent edition is that by Sir 
H. Ellis, 4to. Lond. 1812. 

t First pubHshed in 1516. The last edition is that of Sir H. Elhs, Lond. 
4to. 1811. 



170 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

books, that twenty years of his life had been spent for the greater 
part in writing against the Lollards. But, whatever effect his 
arguments may have produced upon those against whom they 
were directed, they gave little satisfaction to the more zealous 
spirits on his own side, who probably thought that he was too 
fond of reasoning with errors demanding punishment b}^ a cautery 
sharper than that of the pen ; and the end was that he was him- 
self, in the year 1457, charged with heresy, and, having been found 
guilt}^, was first compelled to read a recantation, and to commit 
fourteen of his books, T\dth his own hands, to the flames at 
St. Paul's Cross, and then deprived of his bishopric, and con- 
signed to an imprisonment in which he was allowed the use 
neither of writing materials nor of books, and in which he is 
supposed to have died about two years after. One especial 
heresy alleged to be found in his writings was, that in regard 
to matters of faith the church was not infallible. Bishop 
Pecock's Life has been ably and learnedly written by the 
Eev. John Lewis, to whom we also owe biographies of Wiclif 
and of Caxton. His numerous treatises are partly in English, 
partly in Latin. Of those in English the most remarkable is one 
entitled The Eepressor, which he produced in 1449. A short 
specimen, in which the spelling, but only the spelling, is 
modernized, tn^III give some notion of his manner of writing, 
and of the extent to which the language had been adapted to 
prose eloquence or reasoning of the more formal kind in that 
age:— 

" Say to me, good sir, and answer hereto : when men of the country 
upland hringen into London in Midsummer eve branches of trees fro 
Bishop's Wood, and flowers fro the field, and betaken tho ^ to citizens of 
London for to therewith array her^ houses, shoulden men of London, 
receiving and taking tho branches and tiowers, say and hold that tho 
branches grewen out of the carts which broughten hem ^ to London, and 
that tho carts or the hands of the bringers weren grounds and fundaments 
of tho branches and flowers? God forbid so little wit be in her heads. 
Certes, though Christ and his apostles weren now living at London, and 
would bring, so as is now said, branches from Bishop's Wood, and flowers 
from the fields, into London, and woulden hem deliver to men, that they 
make therewith her houses gay, into remembrance of St. John Baptist, 
and of this that it was prophesied of him, that many shoulden joy of his 
birth, yet tho men of London, receiving so tho branches and flowers, 
oughten not say and feel that tho branches and flowers grewen out of 
Christ's hands. Tho branches grewen out of the boughs upon which they 
in Bishop's Wood stooden, and tho boughs grewen out of stocks or 



1 Take them, or those. ^ Their. ^ Them. 



SIR JOHN FORTESCUE. 171 

truncheons, and the tmncheons or shafts grewen out of the root, and the 
root out of the next earth thereto, upon which and in which the root is 
buried. So that neither the cart, neitlier the hands of the hringers, neither 
tho bringers ben the grounds or fundaments of tho branches." 

The good bishop, we see, has a popular and lively as well as 
clear and precise way of putting things. It may be doubted, 
nevertheless, if his ingenious illustrations would be quite as 
convincing to the earnest and excited innovators to whom they 
were addressed as they were satisfactory to himself. 

Another eminent English prose T^^iter of this date was Sir 
John Fortescue, who was Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench 
under Henry YI., and to whom the king is supposed to have 
also confided the great seal at some time during his expulsion 
from the throne. Fortescue is the author of various treatises, 
some in English, some in Latin, most of which, however, still 
remain in manuscript. One in Latin, which was first sent to 
press in the reign of Henry VIII., and has been repeatedly 
reprinted since, is commonly referred to under the title of De 
Landibus Legum Anglise. It has also been several times trans- 
lated into English. This treatise is drawn up in the form of a 
dialogue between the author and Henry's unfortunate son, 
Edward Prince of Wales, so barbarously put to death after the 
battle of Tewkesbury. Fortescue's only English work that has 
been printed was probably written at a later date, and would 
appear to have had for its object to secure for him, now that the 
Lancastrian cause was beaten to the ground, the favour of the 
Yorkist king, Edward lY. It was first published, in 1714, by 
Mr. John Fortescue Aland, of the Middle Temple, with the title 
of The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, 
as it more particularly regards the English Constitution, — whicli, 
of course, is modern, but has been generally adopted to designate 
the work. The following passage (in Avhich the spelling is again 
reformed) will enable the reader to compare Fortescue as a writer 
with his contemporary Pecock, and is also curious both for its 
matter and its spirit : — 

And how so be it that the French king reigneth upon his people clomini-o 
regali, jet St. Lewis, sometime king there, ne any of his predecessors set 
never talHes ne other impositions upon the people of that land without the 
consent of the three estates, which, when they may be assembled, are like 
to the court of Parliament in England. And this order kept many of 
his successors till late days, that Englishmen kept such a war in France 
that the three estates durst not come together. And then, for that cause, 
and for great necessity which the French king had of goods for the defence 
of that land, he took npon him to set tallies and other impositions upon 



172 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

the commons without the assent of the three estates ; but yet he would 
not set any such charges, nor hath set, upon the nobles, for fear of rebellion. 
And, because the commons, though they have grudged, have not rebelled, 
nor be hardy to rebel, the French kings have yearly sithen^ set such 
charges upon them, and so augmented the same charges as the same 
commons be so impoverished and destroyed that they may uneath^ live. 
They drink water, they eat apples, with bread, right brown, made of rye. 
They eat no flesh, but if it be selden ^ a little lard, or of the entrails or 
heads of beasts slain for the nobles and merchants of the land. They wear 
no woollen, but if it be a poor coat under their uttermost garment, made of 
great canvas, and passen not their knee ; wherefore they be gartered and 
their thighs bare. Their wives and children gone barefoot. They may in 
none otherwise live ; for some of them that was wont to pay to his land- 
lord for his tenement which he hireth by the year a scute "* payeth now to 
the king, over^ that scute, five scutes. Where-through they be artied ^ 
by necessity, so to watch, labour, and grub in the ground for their sus- 
tenance, that their nature is much wasted, and the kind of them brought 
to nought. They gone crooked, and are feeble, not able to fight nor to 
defend the realm ; nor have they weapon, nor money to buy them weapon, 
withal ; but verily they live in the most extreme poverty and misery ; 
and yet they dwell in one of the most fertile realms of the world. Where- 
through the French king hath not men of his own realm able to defend 
it, except his nobles, which bearen not such impositions, and therefore they 
are right likely of their bodies ; by which cause the king is compelled to 
make his armies, and retinues for defence of his land, of strangers, as Scots, 
Spaniards, Aragoners, men of Almayne,^ and of other nations ; else all his 
enemies might overrun him ; for he hath no defence of his own, except his 
castles and fortresses. Lo ! this the fruit of his jus regale. 

It is in the same spirit that the patriotic chief justice else- 
where boasts, that there were more Englishmen hanged for 
robbery in one year than Frenchmen in seven, and that " if an 
Englishman be poor, and see another having riches which may 
be taken from him by might, he will not spare to do so." 

Fortescue was probably born not much more than thirty years 
after Pecock ; but the English of the judge, in vocabulary, in 
grammatical forms, in the modulation of the sentences, and in its 
air altogether, might seem to exhibit quite another stage of the 
language. 

Although both Pecock and Fortescue lived to see the great 
invention of printing, and the latter at any rate survived the 
introduction of the new art into his native country, no production 

' Since. 2 Scarcely, with difficulty (uneasily"). 

3 Seldom, on rare occasions. 

4 An escut, or ecu (d'or), about three shillings and fourpence. 
* In addition to, over and above. ^ Compelled. 
^ Germany. 



SIR THOMAS MALORY. 173 

of either appears to have been given to the world through the 
press in the lifetime of the writer. Perhaps this was also the 
case with another prose writer of this date, who is remembered, 
however, less by his name than by the work of which he is the 
author, and which still continues to be read, the famous history 
of King Arthur, commonly known under the name of the Morte 
Arthur. This work was first printed by Caxton in the year 
1485. He tells us in his prologue, or preface, that the copy was 
given him by Sir Thomas Malory, Knight, who took it, out of 
certain books in French, and reduced it into English. Malory 
himself states at the end, that he finished his task in the ninth 
year of King Edward IV., which would be in 1469 or 1470. 
The Morte Arthur was several times reprinted in the course of 
the following century and a half, the latest of the old editions 
having appeared in a quarto volume in 1634. Erom this, two 
reprints were brought out by different London booksellers in the 
same year, 1816; one in three duodecimos, the other in two. 
But the standard modern edition is that which appeared in two 
Volumes quarto in the following year, 1817, exactly reprinted 
from Caxton's original edition, with the title of The Byrth. Lyfe, 
and Actes of Kyng Arthur ; of his noble Knyghtes of the Eounde 
Table, &c., with an Introduction and Notes, by Kobert Southey. 
Malory, whoever he may have been (Leland says he was Welsh), 
and supposing him to have been in the main only a translator, 
must be admitted to show considerable mastery of expression ; 
his English is always animated and flowing, and, in its earnest- 
ness and tenderness, occasionally rises to no common beauty and 
eloquence. The concluding chapters in particular have been 
much admired. We extract a few sentences : — 

Then Sir Lancelot, ever after, eat but little meat, nor drank, but con- 
tinually mourned until he was dead ; and then he sickened more and 
more, and dried and dwindled away. For the bishop, nor none of his 
fellows, might not make him to eat, and little he drank, that he was soon 
waxed shorter by a cubit than he was, that the people could not know 
him. For evermore day and night he prayed [taking no rest], but need- 
fully as nature required ; sometimes he slumbered a broken sleep ; and 
always he was lying grovelling upon King Arthur's and Queen Guenever's 
tomb ; and there was no comfort that the bishop, nor Sir Bors, not none of 
all his fellows could make him ; it availed nothing. 

Oh ! ye mighty and pompous lords, winning in the glorious transitory 
of this unstal3le life, as in reigning over great realms and mighty great 
countries, fortified with strong castles and towers, edified with many a 
rich city ; yea also, ye fierce and mighty knights, so valiant in adventurous 
deeds of arms, behold ! behold ! see how this mighty conqueror, King 



174 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Arthur, whom in his human life all the world doubted,^ yea also the nohle 
Queen Gruenever, which sometime sat in her chair adorned with gold, pearls, 
and precious stones, now lie full low in obscure foss, or pit, covered with 
clods of earth and clay ! Behold also this mighty champion, Sir Lancelot, 
peerless of all knighthood ; see now how he lieth grovelling upon the cold 
mould ; now being so feeble and faint, that sometime was so terrible : 
how, and in what manner, ought ye to be so desirous of worldly honour so 
dangerous ? Therefore, me thinketh this present book is right necessary 
often to be read ; for in all ^ ye find the most gracious, knightly, and vir- 
tuous war, of the most noble knights of the world, whereby they got 
praising continually ; also me seemeth, by the oft reading thereof, ye shall 
greatly desire to accustom yourself in follo^ving of those gracious knightly 
deeds ; that is to say, to dread God and to love righteousness, faithfully 
and courageously to serve your sovereign prince ; and, the more that God 
hath given you the triumphal honour, the meeker ought ye to be, ever 
fearing the unstableness of this deceitful world. 

And so, within fifteen days, they came to Joyous Guard, and there they 
laid his corpse in the body of the quire, and sung and read many psalters 
and prayers over him and about him ; and even his visage was laid open 
and naked, that all folk might behold him. For such was the custom in 
those days, that all men of worship should so lie with open visage till that 
they were buried. And right thus as they were at their service there came 
Sir Ector de Maris, that had sought seven years all England, Scotland, and 
Wales, seeking his brother Sir Lancelot. ... 

And then Sir Ector threw his shield, his sword, and his helm from him ; 
and when he beheld Sir Lancelot's visage, he fell down in a swoon ; and, 
when lie awoke, it were hard for any tongue to tell the doleful complaints 
that he made for his brother. " Ah, Sir Lancelot," said he, " thou wert 
head of all Christian knights." — " And now, I dare say," said Sir Bors, " that 
Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, thou wert never matched of none earthly 
knight's hands. And thou wert the courtliest knight that ever bare 
shield ; and thou wert the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode 
horse ; and thou wert the truest lover, of a sinful man, that ever loved 
woman ; and thou wert the kindest man that ever stroke with sword ; and 
thou wert the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights ; 
and thou wert the meekest man, and the gentlest, that ever eat in hall 
among ladies ; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that 
ever X3ut spear in rest." 



English Poets. — Occleve; Lydgate. 

The most niimerous class of writers in the mother tongue 
belonging to this time, are the poets, by courtesy so called. We 
must refer to the learned and curious pages of Warton, or to the 
still more elaborate researches of Eitson,* for the names of a 

1 Dreaded (held as redouhtahle). 2 jt ? 

** Bibliographia Poetica 



LYDGATE. 175 

crowd of worthless and forgotten versifiers that fill up the annals 
of our national minstrelsy from Chaucer to Loid Surrey. The 
last-mentioned antiquary has furnished a list of about seventy 
English poets who flourished in this interval. The first known 
writer of any considerable quantity of verse after Chaucer is 
Thomas Occleve. Warton places him about the year 1420. He 
is the author of many minor pieces, which mostly remain in 
manuscript — although " six of peculiar stupidity," says Eitson, 
"were selected and published" by Dr. Askew in 1796; — and 
also of a longer poem, entitled De Eegimine Principum (On the 
Government of Princes), chiefly founded on a Latin work, with 
the same title, written in the thirteenth century by an Italian 
ecclesiastic Egidius, styled the Doctor Fundatissimus, and on 
the Latin treatise on the game of chess of Jacobus de Casulis, 
another Italian writer of the same age — the latter being the 
original of the Game of the Chess, translated by Caxton from the 
French, and printed by him in 1474. Occleve's poem has never 
been published — and is chiefly remembered for a drawiug of 
Chaucer by the hand of Occleve, which is found in one of the 
manuscripts of it now in the British Museum.* Occleve 
repeatedly speaks of Chaucer as his master and poetic father, 
and was no doubt personally acquainted with the great poet. 
All that Occleve appears to have gained, however, from his 
admirable model is some initiation in that smoothness and regu- 
larity of diction of which Chaucer's writings set the first great 
example. His own endowment of poetical power and feeling 
was very small — the very titles of his pieces, as Warton remarks, 
indicating the poverty and frigidity of his genius. 

By far the most famous of these versifiers of the fifteenth 
century is John Lydgate, the monk of Bury, whom the Historian 
of our Poetry considers to have arrived at his highest point of 
eminence about the year 1430. Eitson has given a list of about 
250 poems attributed to Lydgate. Indeed he seems to have 
followed the manufacture of rhymes as a sort of trade, furnishiug 
any quantity to order whenever he was called upon. On one 
occasion, for instance, we find him employed by the historian 
Whethamstede, who was abbot of St. Albans, to make a trans- 
lation into English, for the use of that convent, of the Latin 
legend of its patron saint. " The chronicler who records a part 
of this anecdote," observes Warton, " seems to consider Lydgate's 
translation as a matter of mere manual mechanism ; for he adds, 

* Harl. MS. 4866. This portrait, wliich is a half-length, is coloured. There 
is a full-length portrait in another copy of Occleve's Poems in Eoyal MS. 
17 D. vi. — See Life of Chaucer, by Sir Harris Nicolas, pp. 104, &c. 



176 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

that Whethamstede paid for the translation, the writing, and 
illuminations, one h^^ndred shillings."* Lydgate, however, 
though excessively diffuse, and possessed of very little strength 
or originality of imagination, is a considerably livelier and more 
expert writer than Occleve. His memory was also abundantly 
stored with the learning of his age ; he had travelled in France 
and Italy, and was intimately acquainted with the literature of 
both these countries ; and his English makes perhaps a nearer 
approach to the modern form of the language than that of any 
preceding writer. His best-known poem consists of nine books 
of Tragedies, as he entitles them, respecting the falls of princes, 
translated from a Latin work of Boccaccio's : it was printed at 
London in the reign of Henry VIII. A Selection from the 
Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate, edited by Mr. Halliwell, 
has been printed for the Percy Society, 8vo. Lon. 1840. 



Scottish Poets.— Wynton; James L; Heneyson; Holland; 
Blind Heney. 

The most remarkable portion of our poetical literature belong- 
ing to the fifteenth century (as also, we shall presently find, of 
that belonging to the first half of the sixteenth), was contributed 
by Scottish writers. The earliest successor of Barbour was 
Andrew of Wyntown, or Wynton, a canon regular of the Priory 
of St. Andrews, and Prior of the Monastery of St. Serf's Inch in 
Lochleven, one of the establishments subordinate to that great 
house, who is supposed to have been bom about 1350, and whose 
Originale Cronykil of Scotland appears to have been finished in 
the first years of the fifteenth century. It is a long poem, of 
nine books, written in the same octosyllabic rhyme with" the 
Bruce of Barbour, to which it was no doubt intended to serve 
as a kind of introduction. Wynton, however, has very little of 
the old archdeacon's poetic force and fervour ; and even his 
style, though in general sufficiently simple and clear, is, if any- 
thing, rather ruder than that of his predecessor — a difference 
which is probably to be accounted for by Barbour's frequent 
residences in England and more extended intercourse with the 
world. The Chronykil is principally interesting in an historical 
point of view, and in that respect it is of considerable value and 
authority, for Wynton, besides his merits as a distinct narrator, 
had evidently taken great pains to obtain the best informatioh 
within his reach with regard to the events both of his own and 

* Hist. Eng. Poetry, vol. ii. p. 363. 



I 



JAMES I. OF SCOTLAND. 177 

of precjeding times. The work begins (as was then the fashion), 
with the creation of the world, and comes down to the year 1408 ; 
but the first five books are occupied rather with general than 
with Scottish history. The last four books, together with such 
parts of the preceding ones as contain anything relating to 
British affairs, were very carefully edited by the late Mr. David 
Macpherson (the author of the well-known Annals of Com- 
merce and other works), in two volumes 8vo. Lon. 1795. It 
is deserving of notice that a considerable portion of Wynton's 
Chronicle is not his own composition, but was the contribution 
of another contemporary poet.; namely, all from the 19th chapter 
of the Eighth to the 10th chapter of the Kinth Book inclusive, 
comprising the space from 1324 to 1390, and forming about a 
third of the four concluding books. This he conscientiously 
acknowledges, in very careful and explicit terms, both at the 
beginning and end of the insertion. We may give what he says 
in the latter place, as a short sample of his style : — 

This part last treated beforn, 

Fra Davy the Brus our king wes horn, 

While ^ his sister son Robert 

The Second, our king, than called Stuert, 

That nest^ him reigned successive, 

His days had ended of his live, 

Wit ye well, wes nought my dite f 

Thereof I dare me well acquite. 

Wha that it dited, nevertheless, 

He showed him of mair cunnandness 

Than me commendis^ his treatige, 

But^ favour, wha^ will it clearly prize. 

This part wes written to me send ; 

And I, that thought for to mak end 

Of that purpose I took on hand, 

Saw it was well accordand 

To my matere ; I wes right glad ; 

For I was in my travail sad ; 

I eked'' it here to this dite. 

For to mak me some respite. 

This is interesting as making it probable that poetical, or a 
least metrical, composition in the national dialect was common 
in Scotland at this early date. 

Of all our poets of the early part of the fifteenth century 
the one of greatest eminence must be considered to be King 

1 Till. 2 Next. 3 Writing. 

^ He showed himself of more cunning (skill) than I who commend. 
5 Without. 6 Whosoever. 7 Added. 



178 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

James 1. of Scotland, even if lie be only the autlior of The 
King's Quair (that is, the King's quire or hook), his claim to which 
has scarcely been disputed. It is a serious poem, of nearly 
1400 lines, arranged in seven-line stanzas; the style in great 
part allegorical ; the subject, the love of the royal poet for the 
lady Joanna Beaufort, whom he eventually married, and whom 
he is said to have first beheld walking in the garden below from 
the window of his prison in-the Eound Tower of Windsor Castle. 
The poem was in all probability written during his detention in 
England, and previous to his marriage, which took place in 
February 1424, a few months before his return to his native 
country. In the concluding stanza James makes grateful mention 
of his — 

maisters dear 

Gower and Chaucer, that on the steppes sate 
Of rhetorick while they were livand here, 

Superlative as poets laureate. 

Of moraUty and eloquence ornate ; 

and he is evidently an imitator of the great father of English 
poetry. The poem too must be regarded as written in English 
rather than in Scotch, although the difference between the two 
dialects, as we have seen, was not so great at this early date as 
it afterwards became, and although James, who was in his 
eleventh year when he was carried awaj^ to England in 1405 by 
Henry IV., may not have altogether avoided the peculiarities 
of his native idiom. The Quair was first published from the 
only manuscript (one of the Selden Collection in the Bodleian 
Librarj^), by Mr. W. Tytler at Edinburgh, in 1783 ; there have 
been several editions since. Two other poems of considerable 
length, in a humorous style, have also been attributed to James I. 
— Peebles to the Play, and Christ's Kirk on the Green, both in 
the Scottish dialect; but they are more probably the produc- 
tions of his equally gifted and equally unfortunate descendant 
James V. (b. 1511, d. 1542). Chalmers, however, assigns the 
former to James I. As for the two famous comic ballads of 
The Gaberlunyie Man, and the Jolly Beggar, which it has been 
usual among recent writers to speak of as by one or other 
of these kings, there seems to be no reasonable ground — not 
even that of tradition of any antiquity — for assigning them to 
either. 

Chaucer, we have seen, appears to have been unknown to his 
contemporary Barbour ; but after the time of James I. the Scot- 
tish poetry for more than a century bears evident traces of the 
imitation of the great English master. It was a consequence 



PtOBERT HENRYSON. 179 

of tlie relative circumstances of the two countries, that, while 
the literature of Scotland, the poorer and ruder of the two, could 
exert no influence upon that of England, the literature of England 
could not fail powerfully to affect and modify that of its more 
backward neighbour. No English writer would think of study- 
ing or imitating Barbour ; but every Scottish poet who arose 
after the fame of Chaucer had passed the border would seek, or, 
even if he did not seek, would still inevitably catch, some 
inspiration from that great example. If it could in any cir- 
cumstances have happened tliat Chaucer should have remained 
unknown in Scotland, the singular fortunes of James I. were 
shaped as if on purpose to transfer the manner and spirit of his 
poetiy into the literature of that countr}". From that time for- 
ward the native voice of the Scottish muse was mixed with this 
other foreign voice. One of the earliest Scottish poets after 
James I. is Eobert Henrj^son, or Henderson, the author of the 
beautiful pastoral of Eobin and Makjme, which is popularly 
known from having been printed by Bishop Percy in his 
Eeliques. He has left us a continuation or sup]3lement to 
Chaucer's Troilus and Creseide, which is commonly printed 
along with the works of that poet under the title of The Testa- 
ment of Fair Creseide. All that is known of the era of Henryson 
is that he was alive and very old about the close of the fifteenth 
century. He may therefore probably have been born about the 
time that James I. returned from England. Hemyson is also 
the author of a translation into English or Scottish verse of 
jEsop's Fables, of which there is a MS. in the Harleian Collec- 
tion (No. 3865), and which was printed at Edinburgh in 8vo. in 
1621, under the title of The Moral Fables of ^sop the Phrygian, 
compyled into eloquent and ornamental meter, by Eobert Hen- 
rison, schoolemaster of Dumferling. To Henryson, moreover, 
as has been already noticed, Mr. Laing attributes the tale of 
Oipiheus and Eurydice contained in the collection of old poetry, 
entitled The Knightly Tale of Golagrus and Gawane, &c., re- 
printed by him in 1827. 

Contemporary, too, with Henryson, if not perhaps rather before 
him, was Sir John or Eicbard Holland. His poem entitled The 
Buke of the Howlat (that is, the owl), a wild and rugged effu- 
sion in alliterative metre, cannot be charged as an imitation of 
Chaucer, or of any other English writer of so late a date. 

Another Scottish poet of this time the style and spirit as well 
as the subject of whose poetry must be admitted to be exclusively 
national is Henry the Minstrel, commonly called Blind Hariy, 
author of the famous poem on the life and acts of Wallace. The 



180 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AXD LANGUAGE. 

testimony of the historian John Major to the time at which 
Henry wrote is sufficiently express : " The entire book of William 
Wallace," he says, " Henry, who was blind from his birth, com- 
posed in the time of my infancy (meas infantiae tempore cudit), and 
what things used popularly to be reported wove into popular verse, 
in which he was skilled." jMajor is believed to have been bom 
about 1469 ; so that Henry's poem may be assigned to the end of 
the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The standard edition 
is that published from a manuscript dated 1488 by Dr. Jamieson 
along with Barbour's poem, 4to. Edin. 1820. The Wallace, which 
is a long poem of about 12,000 decasyllabic lines, used to be a 
still greater favourite than was The Bruce with the author's 
countrymen ; and Dr. Jamieson does not hesitate to place Hariy 
as a poet before Barbour. In this judgment, however, probably 
few critical readers will concur, although both Warton and Ellis, 
without going so far, have also acknowledged in warm terms the 
iTide force of the Blind Minstrel's genius. It may be remarked, 
by the way, that were it not for Major's statement, and the 
common epithet that has attached itself to his name, we should 
scarcely have supposed that the author of Wallace had been 
either blind from his. birth or blind at all. He nowhere himself 
alludes to any such circumstance. His poem, besides, abounds 
in descriptive passages, and in allusions to natural appearances 
and other objects of sight : perhaps, indeed, it might be said that 
there is an ostentation of that kind of wiiting, such as we meet 
with also in the modern Scotch poet Blacklock's verses, and 
which it may be thought is not unnatural to a blind person. 
Nor are his apparent literary acquirements to be very easily 
reconciled with Major's account, who represents him as going 
about reciting his verses among the nobility {coram principihus) , 
and thereby obtaining food and raiment, of which, says the his- 
torian, he was worthy (victum, et vestitum, quo dignus erat, nactus 
est). "He seems," as Dr. Jamieson observes, "to have been 
pretty well acquainted with that kind of history which was 
commonly read in that period." The Doctor refers to allusions 
which he makes in various places to the romance histories of 
Hector, of Alexander the Great, of Julius Caesar, and of Charle- 
magne ; and he conceives that his style of writing is more 
richly strewed with the more peculiar phraseology of the writers 
of romance than that of Barbour. But what is most remarkable 
is that he distinctly declares his poem to be throughout a trans- 
lation from the Latin. The statement, which occurs toward the 
conclusion, seems too express and particular to be a mere imita- 
tion of the usage of the romance -writers, many of whom appeal, 



HENRY THE MINSTREL. 181 

but generally in very vague terms, to a Latin original for their 
marvels : — 

Of Wallace life wha has a further feeP 

May show furth mair with wit and eloquence ; 

For I to this have done my diligence, 

Efter the proof given fra the Latin book 

Whilk Maister Blair in his time undertook, 

In fair Latin compiled it till ane end : 

With thir witness the mair is to commend.^ 

Bishop Sinclair than lord was of Dnnkell ; 

He gat this book, and confirmed it himsell 

For very true ; therefore he had no drede ;^ 

Himself had seen great part of Wallace deed. 

His purpose was till have sent it to Rome, 

Our fader of kirk thereon to give his doom. 

But Maistre Blair and als Shir Thomas Gray 

Efter Wallace they lestit* mony day : 

Thir twa^ knew best of Gud Schir William's deed, 

Fi-a sixteen year while^ nine and twenty yeid/ 

In another place (Book V. v. 538 et seq.) he says : — 

Maistre John Blair was oft in that message, 
A worth 5^ clerk, baith wise and right savage. 
Lewit^ he was before in Paris town 
Amang maisters in science and renown. 
Wallace and he at hame in schul had been : 
Soon efterwart, as verity is seen, 
He was the man that principal undertook, 
That first compiled in dite^ the Latin book 
Of Wallace life, right famous in renown ; 
And Thomas Gray, person of Libertown. 

Blind Harry's notions of the literary character are well exem- 
plified by his phrase of a " worthy clerk, baith wise and right 
savage." He himself, let his scholarship have been what it may, 
is in spirit as thorough a Scot as if he had never heard the sound 
of any other than Kis native tongue, tlis gruff patriotism speaks 
out in his opening lines : — 

Our antecessors, that we suld of read, 
And hold in mind their noble worthy deed, 

' Knowledge. 

2 We do not profess to understand this line. Thir is Scotch for these. 
Mair is mar in Jamieson. ^ Doubt. 

* Survived (lasted). ^ These two, 

6 Till. 7 Went, passed. 

8 Dr. Jamieson's only interpretation is " allowed, left." 9 Writing. 



182 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

We lat owerslide,^ through very slenthfulness, 

And casts its ever till other business. 

Till honour enemies is our haiP intent ; 

It has been seen in thir times bywent : 

Our auld enemies comen of Saxons blud, 

That never yet to Scotland wald do gud, 

But ever on force and contrar hail their will, 

How great kindness there has been kythe^ them till. 

It is well knawn on mony divers side 

How they have ^vrought into their mighty pride 

To hald Scotland at under evermair : 

But God above has made their might to pair.* 

Of the fighting and slaying, which makes up by far the gTeater 
part of the poem, it is difficult to find a sample that is short 
enough for our purpose. The following is a small portion of what 
is called the battle of Shortwoodshaw : — 

On Wallace set a bicker bauld and keen ; 

A bow he bare was big and well beseen, 

And aiTOTTS als, baith lang and sharp with aw ;^ 

iS[o man was there that Wallace bow might draw. 

Eight stark he was, and in to souer gear f 

Bauldly he shot amang they^ men of wer.^ 

Ane angel heade^ to the huiks he drew 

And at a shot the foremost soon he slew. 

Inglis archers, that hardy war and wight, 

Amang the Scots bickered with all their might ; 

Their aweful shot was felon^° for to bide ; 

Of WaUace men they woundit sore that tide ; 

Few of them was sicker^^ of archery ; 

Better they were, an they gat even party, 

In field to bide either vnth swerd or spear. 

Wallace perceivit his men tuk mickle deir :^^ 

He gart^^ them change, and stand nought in to stead -^^ 

He cast all ways to save them fra the dead.^-^ 

Full great travail upon himself tuk he ; 

Of Southron men feiP*' archers he gart dee.^'' 

Of Longcashier^^ bowmen was in that place 

A sair^^ archer aye waitit on Wallace, 



* Allow to slip out of memory. 2 Whole. 

^ Shown. ^ Diminish, impah, 

^ Dr. Jamieson's only interpretation is owe. It would almost seem as if we 
had here the modern Scottish witha' for loithall. 

^ In sure warhke accoutrements. ' These. 

s War. 9 The barbed head of an arrow. ^o Terrible. 

1^ Sure. ^'^ Took much hazard, ran much risk. ^^ Caused. 

1* Stand not in their place. Perhaps it should be "o stead," that is. 
one place. ^'^ Death. ^^ Many. 

'^^ Caused die. ^^ Lancashire. ^^ Skilful. 



HENRY THE MINSTREL. 183 

At ane opine,^ whar he nsit to repair ; 
At him he drew a sicker shot and sair 
Under the chin, through a collar of steel 
On the left side, and hurt his haise^ some deal. 
Astonied he was, but nought greatly aghast ; 
Out fra his men on him he foUowit fast ; 
In the turning with gud will has him ta'en 
Upon the crag,^ in sunder straik the bain. 

It will be seen from tMs specimen that the Blind Minstrel is 
a vigorous versifier. His descriptions, however, though both 
clear and forcible, and even not nnfrequently animated by a dra- 
matic abruptness and boldness of expression, want the bounding 
airy spirit and flashing ligM of those of Barbour. As a speci- 
men of his graver style we may give his Envoy or concluding 
lines : — 

G-o, noble book, fulfillit of gud sentence, 

Suppose thou be barren of eloquence : 

Gro, worthy book, fulfillit of suthfast deed ; 

But in langage of help thou hast great need. 

Whan gud makers'* rang weil into Scotland, 

Great harm was it that nane of them ye fand.^ 

Yet there is part that can thee weil avance ; 

Now bide thy time, and be a remembrance. 

I you besek of your benevolence, 

Wha will nought lou,^ lak nought^ my eloquence ; 

(It is weil knawn I am a bureP man) 

For here is said as gudly as I can ; 

My sprite feeles ne termes asperans.^ 

Now beseek God, that giver is of grace, 

Made hell and erd,^'' and set the heaven above, 

That he us orant of his dear lestand^^ love. 



Prose Writers : — More ; Elyot ; Tyndal ; Cranmer ; Latimer. 

The fact most deserving of remark in the progress of English 
literature, for the first half of the sixteenth century, is the 
cultivation that now came to be bestowed upon the language in 
the form of prose composition, — a form always in the order of 
time subsequent to that of verse in the natural development of a 

^ Open place? 2 j;[eck. ^ Throat. 

'^ Poets. 5 Found. ^ Love? 

' Scoff not at. ^ Boorish, clownish. 

^ Understands no lofty (aspiring) terms. But it seems impossible that 
asperans can rhyme to grace. 

10 Earth. " Lasting. 



181 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

national language and literature. Long before this date, indeed, 
Chancer, in addition to what he did in his proper field, had given 
proof of how far his genius preceded his age by several examples 
of composition in prose, in which may be discerned the presence 
of something of the same high art with which he first elevated 
our poetry ; but, besides that his genius drew him with greatest 
force to poetry, and that the foreign models upon which he seems 
chiefly to have formed himself led him in the same direction, the 
state of the English language at that day perhaps fitted it better 
for verse than for prose, or rather, it had not yet arrived at the 
point at which it could be so advantageously employed in prose 
as in verse. At all events Chaucer had no worthy successor as a 
writer of prose, any more than as a writer of poetry, till more 
than a century after his death. Meanwhile, however, the 
language, though not receiving much artificial cultivation, was 
still undergoing a good deal of what, in a certain sense, might be 
called application to literary purposes, by its employment both 
in public proceedings and documents, and also in many popular 
writings, principally on the subject of the new opinions in 
religion, both after and previous to the invention of printing. 
In this more extended use and exercise, by persons of some 
scholarship at least, if not bringing much artistic feeling and 
skill to the task of composition, it must, as a mere language, or 
system of vocables and grammatical forms, have not only sustained 
many changes and modifications, but, it is probable, acquired on 
the whole considerable enlargement of its capacities and powers, 
and been generally carried forward towards maturity under the 
impulse of a vigorous principle of growth and expansion. But 
it is not till some time after the commencement of the sixteenth 
century that we can properly date the rise of our classical prose 
literature. Perhaps the earliest compositions that are entitled to 
be included under that name are some of those of Sir Thomas 
More, especially his Life and Eeign of King Edward Y., which 
Eastell, his brother-in-law, by whom it was first printed in 1557, 
from, as he informs us, a copy in More's handwriting, states to 
have been written by him when he was under-sheriff of London, 
in the year 1513.* Most of More's other English writings are 

* Sir Henry Ellis, however, in the Preface to his edition of Harding's 
Chronicle (4to. 1812), has called attention to what had not before been 
noticed, namely, that the writer speaks as if he had been present with 
Edward IV. in his last sickness, wliich More could not have been, being 
then (in 1483) only a child of three years old ; and Sir Henry infers 
that the manuscript from which the tract was printed by Eastell, although 
in More's handwriting, could have been only a copy made by him of a 
narrative drawn up by some one else, very probably Cardinal Morton. But, 



PROSE WRITERS. 185 

of a controversial character, and are occupied about subjects both 
of very temporary importance, and that called up so much of 
the eagerness and bitterness of the author's party zeal as con- 
siderably to disturb and mar both his naturally gentle and be- 
nignant temper and the oily eloquence of his style ; but this his- 
toric piece is characterized throughout by an easy narrative flow 
which rivals the sweetness of Herodotus. It is certainly the 
first English historic composition that can be said to aspire to 
be more than a mere chronicle. 

The letter which Sir Thomas More wrote to his wife in 1528, 
after the burning of his house at Chelsea, aftbrds one of the best 
specimens of the epistolary style of this period : — 

Maistres Alyce, in my most, harty wise I recommend me to you ; and, 
whereas I am enfourmed by my son Heron of the losse of our barnes and 
of our neighbours also, with all the corn that was therein, albeit (saving 
God's pleasure) it is gret pitie of so much good corne lost, yet sith it hath 
liked hym to sende us such a chauuce, we must and are bounden, not only 
to be content, but also to be glad of his visitacion. He sente us all that 
we have loste : and, sith he hath by such a chaunce taken it away againe, 
his pleasure be fulfilled. Let us never grudge ther at, but take it in good 
worth, and hartely thank him, as well for adversitie as for prosperite. And 
peradventure we have more cause to thank him for our losse then for our 
winning ; for his wisdome better seeth what is good for vs then we do our 
selves. Therfore I pray you be of good chere, and take all the howsold 
with you to church, and there thanke God, both for that he hath given us, 
and for that he hath taken from us, and for that he hath left us, which if 
it please hym he can en crease when he will. And if it please hym to leave 
us yet lesse, at his pleasure be it. 

I pray you to make some good ensearche what my poore neighbours 
have loste, and bid them take no thought therfore : for and 1 shold not 
leave myself a spone, ther shal no pore neighbour of mine here no losse by 
any chauuce happened in my house. I pray you be with my children and 
your househokl merry in God. And devise some what with your frendes, 
what waye wer best to take, for provision to be made for corne for our 
household, and for sede thys yere comming, if ye thinke it good that we 
kepe the ground stil in our handes. And whether ye think it good that 
we so shall do or not, yet I think it were not best sodenlye thus to leave 
it all up, and to put away our folke of our farme till we have somwhat 
advised us thereon. How belt if we have more nowe then ye shall nede, 
and which can get them other maisters, ye may then discharge us of them. 
But I would not that any man were sodenly sent away he wote nere 
wether. 



although Morton was a person of distinguished eloquence, the style is surely 
far too modern to have proceeded from a writer who was born within ten 
years after the close of the fourteenth century, the senior of More by seventy 
years. 



186 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

At my comming hither I perceived none other hnt that I shold tary still 
with the Kinges Grace. But now I shal (I think), because of this chance, 
get leave this next weke to come home and se you : and then shall we 
jfurther devyse together nppon all thinges what order shalbe best to take. 
And thus as hartely fare you well with all our children as ye can wishe. 
At Woodestok the thirde daye of Septembre by the hand of 

your louing husbande 

Thomas More Knight.* 

Along with More, as one of tlie earliest writers of classic 
English prose, may be mentioned his friend Sir Thomas Elyot, 
the author of the political treatise entitled The Governor, and of 
various other works, one of which is a Latin and English 
Dictionary, the foundation of most of the compilations of the 
same kind that were published for a century afterwards. More 
was executed in 1535, and Elyot also died some years before the 
middle of the century. William Tyndal's admirable translations 
of the New Testament and of some portions of the Old, and also 
numerous tracts by the same early reformer in his native tongue, 
which he wrote with remarkable correctness as well as with 
great vigour and eloquence, appeared between 1526 and his 
death in 1536. Next in the order of time among our more 
eminent prose writers may be placed some of the distinguished 
leaders of the Eeformation in the latter part of the reign of 
Henry VIII. and in that of Edward VL, more especially 
Archbishop Cranmer, whose compositions in his native tongue 
are of considerable volume, and are characterized, if not by any 
remarkable strength of expression or weight of matter, yet by a 
full and even flow both of words and thought. On the whole, 
Cranmer was the greatest writer among the founders of the 
English Eeformation. His friends and fellow-labourers, Eidley 
and Latimer, were also celebrated in their day for their ready 
popular elocution ; but the few tracts of Eidley's that remain are 
less eloquent than learned, and Latimer's discourses are rather 
quaint and curious than either learned or eloquent in any lofty 
sense of that term. Latimer is stated to have been one of the 
first English students of the Greek language ; but this could 
hardly be guessed from his Sermons, which, except a few scraps 
of Latin, show scarcely a trace of scholarship or literature of an}'' 
kind. In addressing the people from the pulpit, this honest, 
simple-minded bishop, feeling no exaltation either from his 
position or his subject, expounded the most sublime doctrines of 
religion in the same familiar and homely language in which the 
humblest or most rustic of his hearers were accustomed to chaffer 

* Sir Thomas More's Works, by Kastell, 4to. 1557, pp. 1418, 1419. 



PROSE WRITERS. 187 

with one another in the market-place about the price of a yard of 
cloth or a pair of sshoes. Nor, indeed, was he more fastidious 
as to matter than as to manner : all the preachers of that age 
were accustomed to take a wide range over things in general, but 
Latimer went beyond everybody else in the miscellaneous assort- 
ment of topics he used to bring together from every region of 
heaven and earth, — of the affairs of the world that now is as well 
as of that which is to come. Without doubt his sermons must have 
been lively and entertaining far beyond the common run of that 
kind of compositions ; the allusions with which they abounded to 
public events, and to life in all its colours and grades, from the 
palace to the cottage, from the prince to the peasant, — the 
anecdotes of his own experience and the other stories the old 
man would occasionally intersperse among his strictures and 
exhortations, — the expressiveness of his unscrupulous and often 
startling phraseology, — all this, combined with the earnestness, 
piety, and real goodness and simplicity of heart that breathed 
from every word he uttered, may well be conceived to have had 
no little charm for the multitudes that crowded to hear his living 
voice ; even as to us, after the lapse of three centuries, these 
seiTQons of Latimer's are still in the highest degree interesting 
both for the touches they contain in illustration of the manners 
and social condition of our forefathers, and as a picture of a very 
peculiar individual mind. They are also of some curiosity and 
value as a monument of the language of the period ; but to what 
is properly to be called its literature, as we have said, they can 
hardly be considered as belonging at all. 

Generally it may be observed, with regard to the English 
prose of the earlier part of the sixteenth century that it is both 
more simple in its construction, and of a more purely native 
character in other respects, than the style which came into fashion 
in the latter years of the Elizabethan period. When first made 
use of in prose composition, the mother- tongue was written as it 
was spoken ; even such artifices and embellishments as are 
alwa^'s prompted by the nature of verse were here scarcely 
aspired after or thought of; that which was addressed to and 
specially intended for the instruction of the people was set down 
as far as possible in the familiar forms and fashions of the popular 
speech, in genuine native words, and direct unincumbered 
sentences ; no painful imitation of any learned or foreign model 
was attempted, nor any species of elaboration whatever, except 
what was necessary for mere perspicuity, in a kind of writing 
which was scarcely regarded as partaking of the character of 
literary composition at all. The delicacy of a scholarly taste no 



188 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

doubt influenced even the English style of sncli writers as More 
and his more eminent contemporaries or immediate followers ; 
but whatever eloquence or dignity their compositions thus ac- 
quired was not the effect of any professed or conscious endeavour 
to write in English as they would have written in what were 
called the learned tongues. 

The age, indeed, of the critical cultivation of the language for 
the purposes of prose composition had already commenced ; but 
at first that object was pursued in the best spirit and after the 
wisest methods. Erasmus, in one of his Letters, mentions that 
his friend Dean Golet laboured to improve his English style by 
the diligent perusal and study of Chaucer and the other old poets, 
in whose works alone the popular speech was to be found turned 
with any taste or skill to a literary use ; and doubtless others of 
our earliest classic prose writers took lessons in their art in the 
same manner from these true fathers of our vernacular literature. 
And even the first professed critics and reformers of the lan- 
guage that arose among us proceeded in the main in a right 
direction and upon sound principles in the task they undertook. 
The appearance of a race of critical and rhetorical writers in any 
country is, in truth, always rather a symptom or indication than, 
what it has frequently been denounced as being, a cause of the 
corruption and decline of the national literature. The writings 
of Dionysius of Halicamassus and of Quintilian, for instance, 
certainly did not hasten, but probablj^ rather contributed to 
retard, the decay of the literature of ancient Greece and Eome. 
The first eminent English writer of this class was the celebrated 
Roger Ascham, the tutor of Queen Elizabeth, whose treatise 
entitled Toxophilus, the School or Partitions of Shooting, was 
published in 1545. The design of Ascham, in this performance, 
was not only to recommend to his countrymen the use of their 
old national weapon, the bow, but to set before them an example 
and model of a pure and correct English prose style. In his 
dedication of the work. To all the Gentlemen and Yeomen of 
England, he recommends to him that would write well in any 
tongue the counsel of Aristotle, — " To speak as the common 
people do, to think as wise men do." From this we may perceive 
tl^at Ascham had a true feeling of the regard due to the great 
fountrin-head and oracle of the national language — the vocabulary 
of the common people. He goes on to reprobate the practice of 
many English writers, who by introducing into their composi- 
tions, in violation of the Aristotelian precept, many words of 
foreign origin, Latin, French, and Italian, made all things dark 
and hard. " Once," he says, " I communed with a man which 



PROSE WRITERS. 189 

reasoned the Englisli tongue to be enriched and increased thereby, 
saying, Who will not praise that feast where a man shall drink at 
a dinner both wine, ale, and beer ? Truly, quoth I, they be all 
good, every one taken by himself alone : but if you put malmsey 
and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer and all, in one pot, 
you shall make a drink neither easy to be known, nor yet whole- 
some for the body." The English language, however, it may be 
observed, had even already become too thoroughly and essentially 
a mixed tongue for this doctrine of purism to be admitted to the 
letter ; nor, indeed, to take up Ascham's illustration, is it univer- 
sally true, even in regard to liquids, that a salutary and palatable 
beverage can never be made b}^ the interfusion of two or more 
different kinds. Our tongue is now, and w^as many centuries 
ago, not, indeed, in its grammatical structure, but in its vocabu- 
lary, as substantially and to as great an extent Neo-Latin as 
Gothic ; it would be as completely torn in pieces and left the 
mere tattered rag of a language, useless for all the purposes of 
speaking as well as of writing, by having the foreign as by 
having the native element taken out of it. Ascham in his own 
wi'itings uses many words of French and Latin origin (the latter 
mostly derived throngh the medinm of the French) ; nay, the 
common people themselves of necessity did in his day, as they do 
still, use many such foreign words, or words not of English 
origin, and could scarcely have held communication with one 
another on the most ordinary occasions without so doing. It is 
another question whether it might not have been more fortunate 
if the original form of the national speech had remained in a state 
of celibacy and virgin purity ; by the course of events the 
Gothic part of the language has, in point of fact, been maiTied to 
the Latin part of it ; and what God or nature has thus joined 
together it is now beyond the competency of man to put asunder. 
The language, while it subsists, must continue to be the product 
of that union, and nothing else. As for Ascham's own stj'le, 
both in his Toxophilus, and in his Schoolmaster, published in 
1571, three years after the author's death, it is not only clear and 
correct, but idiomatic and muscular. That it is not rich or 
picturesque is the consequence of the character of the writer's 
mind, which was rather rhetorical than poetical. The publica- 
tion of Ascham's Toxophilus was soon followed by an elaborate 
treatise expressly dedicated to the subject of English composi- 
tion — The Art of Ehetorick, for the use of all such as are studious 
of Eloquence, set forth in English, by Thomas Wilson. Wilson, 
whose work appeared in 1553, takes pains to impress the same 
principles that Ascham had laid down before him with regard to 



190 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

purity of style and the general rule of writing well. But tlie 
very solicitude tlius sliown by the ablest and most distinguished 
of those who now assumed the guardianship of the vernacular 
tongue to protect it from having its native character overlaid 
and debased by an intermixture of terms borrowed from other 
languages, may be taken as evidence that such debasement was 
actually at this time going on ; that our ancient English was 
beginning to be oppressed and half suffocated by additions from 
foreign sources brought in upon it faster than it could absorb and 
assimilate them. Wilson, indeed, proceeds to complain that this 
was the case. While some " powdered their talk with over-sea 
language," othere, whom he designates as "the unlearned or 
foolish fantastical, that smell but of learning," wei-e wont, he 
says, " so to Latin their tongues," that simple persons could not 
but wonder at their talk, and think they surely spake by some 
revelation from heaven. It may be suspected, however, that 
this affectation of unnecessary terms, formed from the ancient 
languages, was not confined to mere pretenders to learning. 
Another well-known critical writer of this period, Webster 
Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesy, published in 1682, but 
believed to have been written a good many years earlier, in like 
manner advises the avoidance in writing of such words and 
modes of expression as are used "in the marches and froniiers, 
or in port towns where strangers haunt for traffic sake, or yet in 
universities, where scholars use much peevish aftectation ot 
words out of the primitive languages ;" and he warns his readei^s 
that in some books were already to be found "many inkhom 
terms so ill affected, brought in by men of learning, as preachers 
and schoolmasters, and many strange terms of other languages by 
secretaries, and merchants, and travellers, and many dark words, 
and not usual nor well-sounding, though they be daily spoken at 
court." On the whole, however, Puttenham considers the best 
standard both for speaking and writing to be " the usual speech 
of the court, and that of London and the shires lying about 
London within sixty miles, and not much above." This judg- 
ment is probably correct, although the writer was a gentleman 
pensioner, and perhaps also a cockney b}^ birth. 



Scottish Prose Writers. 



Before the middle of the sixteenth century a few prose writers 
had also appeared in the Scottish dialect. The Scottish History 
of Hector Boethius, or Boecius (Boece or Boyce), translated from 



HAWES; BARKLAY. 191 

the Latin by John Bellenden, was printed at Edinburgh in 1537 ; 
and a translation by the same person of the first Five Books of 
Livy remained in MS. till it was published at Edinburgh, in 4to. 
in 1829 ; a second edition of the translation of Boeeius having 
also been brought out there, in two vols. 4to., the same year. 
But the most remarkable composition in Scottish prose of this 
era is The Oomplaynt of Scotland, printed at St. Andrews in 
1548, which has been variously assigned to Sir James Inglis, 
knight, a country gentleman of Fife, who died in 1554 ; to Wed- 
derburn, the supposed author of the Compendious Book of Godly 
and Spiritual Sangs and Ballats (reprinted from the edition of 
1621 by Sir John Grahame Dalzell, 8vo. Edinburgh, 1801); and 
by its modern editor, the late John Leyden, in the elaborate 
and ingenious Dissertation prefixed to his reprint of the work, 
8vo. Edinburgh, 1801, to the famous poet, Sir David Lyndsay. 

It is worthy of remark, that, although in this work we have 
unquestionably the Scottish dialect, distinctly marked by various 
peculiarities (indeed the author in his prologue or preface ex- 
pressly and repeatedly states that he has written in Scotch, " in 
our Scottis langage," as he calls it), yet one chief characteristic 
of the modern Scotch is still wanting — the suppression of the 
final / after a vowel or diphthong — ^just as it is in Barbour and 
Blind Harry. This change, as we before remarked, is probably 
very modern. It has taken place in all likelihood since Scotch 
ceased to be generally used in writing ; the principle of growth, 
which, after a language passes under the government of the pen, 
is to a great extent suspended, having recovered its activity on 
the dialect being abandoned again to the comparatively lawless 
liberty, or at least looser guardianship, of the lips. 



English Poets : — Hawes ; Barklay. 

The English poetical literature of the first half of the six- 
teenth centur}^ may be fairly described as the dawn of a new 
day. Two poetic names of some note belong to the reign of 
Henry VII. — Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barklay. Hawes ' 
is the author of many pieces, but is chiefly remembered for his 
Pastime of Pleasure, or History of Grand Amour and La Belle 
Pucelle, first printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1517, but 
written about two years earlier. Warton holds this performance 
to be almost the only eifort of imagination and invention which 
had appeared in our poetry since Chaucer, and eulogizes it as 
containing no common touches of romantic and allegoric fiction. 



192 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Hawes was both a scholar and a traveller, and was perfectly- 
familiar with the French and Italian poetry as well as with that 
of his own country. It speaks very little, however, for his 
taste, that, among the preceding English poets, he has evidently 
made Lydgate his model, even if it should be admitted that, 
as Warton affirms, he has added some new graces to the manner 
of that cold and wordy versifier. Lydgate and Hawes may 
stand together as perhaps the two writers who, in the century 
and a half that followed the death of Chaucer, contributed most 
to carry forward the regulation and modernisation of the lan- 
guage which he began. Barklay, who did not die till 1552, 
when he had attained a great age, employed his pen principally 
in translations, in which line his most celebrated performance 
is his Ship of Fools, from the German of Sebastian Brandt, 
which was printed in 1508. Barklay, however, besides con- 
sulting both a French and a Latin version of Brandt's poem, 
has enlarged his original with the enumeration and descrip- 
tion of a considerable variety of follies which he found 
flourishing among his own countrymen. This gives the work 
some value as a record of the English manners of the time; 
but both its poetical and its satirical pretensions are of the very 
humblest order. At this date most of our writers of what was 
called poetry seem to have been occupied with the words in 
which they were to clothe their ideas almost to the exclusion 
of all the higher objects of the poetic art. And that, perhaps, 
is what of necessity happens at a particular stage in the pro- 
gress of a nation's literature — at the stage corresponding to the 
transition state in the growth of the human being between the 
termination of free rejoicing boyhood and the full assurance of 
manhood begun ; which is peculiarly the season not of achieve- 
ment but of preparation, not of accomplishing ends, but of 
acquiring the use of means and instruments, and also, it may be 
added, of the aptitude to mistake the one of these things for the 
other. 



Skelton. 

But the poetry with the truest life in it produced in the reign 
of Henry the Seventh and the earlier part of that of his son 
is undoubtedly that of Skelton. John Skelton may have been 
born about or soon after 1460 ; he studied at Cambridge, if not 
at both universities ; began to write and publish compositions in 
verse between 1480 and 1490; was graduated as poet laureat 



SKELTON. 193 

(a degree in grammar, including versification and rhetoric) at 
Oxford before 1490 ; was admitted ad eundem at Cambridge in 
1493 ; in 1498 took holy orders ; was probably about the same 
time appointed tutor to the young prince Henry, afterwards 
Henry the Eighth; was eventually promoted to be rector of 
Diss in Norfolk; and died in 1529 in the sanctuary at West- 
minster Abbey, where he had taken refuge to escape the ven- 
geance of Cardinal Wolsey, originally his patron, but latterly the 
chief butt at which he had been wont to shoot his satiric shafts. 
As a scholar Skelton had a European reputation in his own day ; 
and the great Erasmus has styled him Britannicarum Uterarum 
decus et lumen (the light and ornament of English letters). His 
Latin verses are distinguished by their purity and classical 
spirit. As for his English poetry, it is generally more of a 
mingled yarn, and of a much coarser fabric. In many of his 
eifusions indeed, poured forth in sympathy with or in aid of some 
popular cry of the day, he is little better than a rhyming buffoon ; 
much of his ribaldry is now nearly unintelligible ; and it may 
be doubted if a considerable portion of his grotesque and appa- 
rently incoherent jingle ever had much more than the sort of 
half meaning with which a half-tipsy writer may satisfy readers 
as far gone as himself. Even in the most reckless of these com- 
positions, however, he rattles along, through sense and nonsense, 
with a vivacity that had been a stranger to our poetry for many 
a weary day ; and his freedom and spirit, even where most 
unrefined, must have been exhilarating after the long fit of 
somnolency in which the English muse had dozed away the last 
hundred years. But much even of Skelton's satiric verse is in- 
stinct with genuine poetical vigour, and a fancy alert, sparkling, 
and various, to a wonderful degree. The charm of his writing 
lies in its natural ease and freedom, its inexhaustible and un- 
tiring vivacity ; and these qualities are found both in their 
greatest abundance and their greatest purity where his subject 
is suggestive of the simplest emotions and has most of a uni- 
versal interest. His Book of Philip Sparrow, for instance, an 
elegy on the sparrow of fair Jane Scroop, slain by a cat in the 
nunnery of Carow, near Norwich, extending (with the " com- 
mendation " of the "goodly maid") to nearly 1400 lines, is un- 
rivalled in the language for elegant and elastic playfulness, and 
a spirit of whim that only kindles into the higher blaze the 
longer it is kept up. The second part, or " Commendation," 
in particular, is throughout animated and hilarious to a wonder- 
ful degree : — the refrain, — 



194 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

For tMs most goodly flower, 
This blossom of fresh colom", 
So Jupiter me succour, 
She fiourisheth new and new 
In beauty and virtue ; 
Eac claritate gemina, 
Gloriosa femina, &c. — 

recurring often so suddenly and unexpectedly, yet always so 
naturally, has an effect like that of the harmonious evolutions of 
some lively and graceful dance. Have we not in this poem, by- 
the-by, tlie true origin of Skelton's peculiar dancing verse ? Is 
it not Anacreontic, as tlie spirit also of the best of bis poetry 
undoubtedly is ?* 




EoY; John Heywood. 



Along with Skelton, viewed as he commonly has been only as 
a satirist, is usually classed William Eoy, a writer who assisted 
Tjmdal in his translation of the Kew Testament, and who is 
asserted by Bale to be tbe author of a singular work entitled, 
Bead me and be not wroth, For I say nothing but troth, which 
is supposed to have been first printed abroad about 152o.'|" This 
is also a satire upon Vv^olsey and tbe clergy in general, and is as 
bitter as might be expected from the supposed author, who, 
having begun his life as a friar, spent the best part of it in the 
service of the Eeformation, and finished it at the stake. Among 
the buffoon-poets of this age, is also to be reckoned John Hey- 
wood, styled the Epigrammatist, from the six centuries of Epi- 
gTarns, or versified jokes, which form a remarkable portion of 
his works. Heywood' s conversational jocularit}^ has the equivo- 
cal credit of having been exceedingly consoling both to the old 
age of Henry VII I. and to his daughter Queen Mary : it must 
have been strong jesting that could stir the sense of the ludicrous 
in either of these terrible personagcB. Besides a number of 
plays, which are the most important of his productions, Hey- 
wood also wrote a long burlesque allegory, which fills a thick 
quarto volume, on the dispute between the old and the new 
i-eligions, under the title of A Parable of the Spider and the 
Fly ; where it appears that by the spider is intended the Pro- 

* A most valuable and acceptable present has been made to the lovers of 
our old poetry in a collected edition of Skelton's Poetical Works, 2 vols. 8vo. 
Lond. Eodd, 1843, by the Eev. Alexander Dyce, who Las performed his 
difficult task in a manner to leave little or nothing further to be desired. 

t Ritson's Bibhog. Poet., p. 318. 



SCOTTISH POETS. 195 

testant party, by the fly the Catholic, but in which, according 
to the judgment of old Harrison, " he dealeth so profoundly, 
and beyond all measure of skill, that neither he himself that 
made it, neither any one that readeth it, can reach unto the 
meaning thereof."* 



Scottish Poets : — Gawin Douglas ; Dunbar ; Lyndsay. 

But, Y/hile in England the new life to which poetry had 
awakened had thus as yet produced so little except ribaldry and 
buffoonery, it is remarkable that in Scotland, where general 
social civilization was much less advanced, the art had con- 
tinued to be cultivated in its highest departments with great 
success, and the language had already been enriched with some 
compositions worthy of any age. Perhaps the Scottish poetry 
of the earlier part of the sixteenth century may be regarded 
as the same spring which had visited England in the latter 
part of the fourteenth, — the impulse originally given by the 
poetry of Chaucer only now come to its height in that northern 
clime. Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, who flourished in 
the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and who is famous for 
his translation of the Mneid, the first metrical version of any 
ancient classic that had yet appeared in the dialect of either 
kingdom, affects great anxiety to eschew " Southron," or Eng- 
lish, and to write his native tongue in all its breadth and plain- 
ness ; but it does not follow, from his avoidance of English 
words, that he may not have formed himself to a great extent 
on the study of English models. At the same time it may be 
admitted that neither in his translation nor in his original works 
of King Hart, and the Palace of Honour, — which are two long 
allegories, full, the latter especially, of passages of great de- 
scriptive beauty, — does Douglas convict himself of belonging to 
the school of Chaucer. He is rather, if not the founder, at least 
the chief representative, of a style of poetry which was attempted 
to be formed in Scotland by enriching and elevating the sim- 
plicity of Barbour and his immediate followers with an infusion 
of something of what was deemed a classic manner, drawn in 
part directly from the Latin writers, but more from those of the 
worst than those of the best age, in part from the French poetry, 
which now began in like manner to aspire towards a classic 
tone. This preference, by the Scottish poets, of Latin and 
Erench to " Southron," as a source from which to supply the 
* Description of Euglaud. 



196 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

deficiencies of tlieir native dialect, had probably no more reason- 
able origin tban the political circumstances and feelings of the 
nation : the spirit of the national genius was antagonistic to it, 
and it therefore never could become more than a temporary- 
fashion. Yet it infected more or less all the v^^^iters of this 
age- and amongst the rest, to a considerable extent, by far the 
greatest of them all, William Dunbar. This admirable master, 
alike of serious and of comic song, may justly be styled the Chaucer 
of Scotland, whether we I'ook to the wide range of his genius, 
or to his eminence in every style over all the poets of his country 
who preceded and all who for ages came after him. That of 
Burns is certainly the only name among the Scottish poets that 
can yet be placed on the same line with that of Dunbar ; and 
even the inspired ploughman, though the equal of Dunbar in 
comic power, and his superior in depth of passion, is not to be 
compared with the elder poet either in strength or in general 
fertility of imagination. Finally, to close the list, comes another 
eminent name, that of Sir David Lyndsay, whose productions 
are not indeed characterised by any high imaginative power, but 
yet display infinite wit, spirit, and variety in all the forms of 
the more familiar poetry. Lyndsay was the favourite, through- 
out his brief reign and life, of the accomplished and unfortunate 
James Y., and survived to do perhaps as good service as any in 
the war against the ancient church by the tales, plays, and other 
products of his abounding satiric vein, with which he fed, and 
excited, and lashed up the popular contempt for the now crazy 
and tumbling fabric once so imposing and so venerated. Per- 
haps he also did no harm by thus taking off a little of the acrid 
edge of mere resentment and indignation with the infusion of a 
dash of merriment, and keeping alive a genial sense of the 
ludicrous in the midst of such serious work. If Dunbar is to 
be compared to Burns, Lyndsay may be said to have his best 
representative among the more recent Scottish poets in Allan 
Ramsay, who does not, however, come so near to Lyndsay by a 
long way as Burns does to Dunbar. 



Surrey; Wyatt. 



Lyndsay is supposed to have survived till about the year 1567. 
Before that date a revival of the higher poetry had come upon 
England like the rising of a new day. Two names are commonly 
jjlaced together at the head of our new poetical literature. Lord 
Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, 



SURREY; WYATT. 197 

memorable in our history as the last victim of the capricioiis and 
sanguinary tyranny of Henry VIII., had already, in his short 
life, which was terminated by the axe of the executioner in his 
twenty-seventh year, carried away from all his countrymen the 
laurels both of knighthood and of song. The superior polish 
alone of the best of Surrey's verses would place him at an im- 
measurable distance in advance of all his immediate predecessors. 
So remarkable, indeed, is tlie contrast in this respect vs^hich his 
poetry presents to theirs, that in modern times there has been 
claimed for Surrey, as we have seen, the honour of having been 
the first to introduce our existing system of rhythm into the 
language. The true merit of Surrey is, that, proceeding upon 
the same system of versification which had been introduced 
by Chaucer, and which, indeed, had in principle been followed 
by all the writers after Chaucer, however rudely or imper- 
fectly some of them may have succeeded in the practice of 
it, he restored to our poetry a correctness, polish, and general 
spirit of refinement such as it had not known since Chaucer's 
time, and of which, therefore, in the language as now spoken, 
there was no previous example W'hatever. To this it may be 
added that he appears to have been the first, at least in this 
age, who sought to modulate his strains after that elder poetry 
of Italy, which thenceforward became one of the chief fountain- 
heads of inspiration to that of England throughout the whole 
space of time over which is shed the golden light of the names 
of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Milton. Surrey's own imagi- 
nation was neither rich nor soaring; and the highest qualities 
of his poetry, in addition to the facility and general mechanical 
perfection of the versification, are delicacy and tenderness. It 
is altogether a very light and bland Favonian breeze. The 
poetry of his friend Wyatt is of a different character, neither so 
flowing in form nor so uniformly gentle in spirit, but perhaps 
making up for its greater ruggedness by a force and a depth of 
sentiment occasionally which Surrey does not reach. The poems 
of Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt w^ere first published 
together in 1557. 

To Surrey we owe the introduction into the language of our 
present foi*m of blank verse, the suggestion of which he pro- 
bably took from the earliest Italian example of that form of 
poetry, a translation of the First and Fourth Books of the JEneid 
by the Cardinal Hippolito de' Medici (or, as some say, by Fran- 
cesco Maria Molza), which was published at Venice in 1541. 
A translation of the same two Books into English blank verse 
appeared in the collection of Sun^ey's Poems published by Tottel 



198 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

in 1557. Dr. Nott has shown that this translation was founded 
upon the metrical Scottish version of Gawin Donglas, which, 
although not published till 1553, had been finished, as the 
author himself informs us, in 1513. But it ought not to be 
forgotten that, as already remarked, we have one example at 
least of another form of blank verse in the Ormulum, centuries 
before Surrey's day. 



THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATUEE. 

Of what is commonly called our Elizabethan literature, the 
greater portion appertains to the reign, not of Elizabeth, but of 
James — to the seventeenth, not to the sixteenth century. The 
common name, nevertheless, is the fair and proper one. It 
sprung up in the age of Elizabeth, and was mainly the product 
of influences which belonged to that age, although their effect 
extended into another. It was born of and ripened by that 
sunny morning of a new day, — "great Eliza's golden time," — 
when a general sense of security had given men ease of mind 
and disposed them to freedom of thought, while the economical 
advancement of the country put life and spirit into everything, 
and its growing power and renown filled and elevated the 
national heart. But such periods of quiet and prosperity seem 
only to be intellectually productive when they have been pre- 
ceded and ushered in by a time of uncertainty and struggle 
which has tried men's spirits : the contrast seems to be wanted 
to make the favourable influences be felt and tell ; or the faculty 
required must come in part out of the strife and contention. 
The literature of our Elizabethan age, more emphatically, may 
be said to have had this double parentage : if that brilliant day 
was its mother, the previous night of storm was its father. 



The Mirror for Magistrates. 



Our classical Elizabethan poetry and other literature dates only 
from about the middle of the reign ; most of what was produced 
in the earlier half of it, constrained, harsh, and immature, still 
bears upon it the impress of the preceding barbarism. Nearly 
coincident with its commencement is the first appearance of a 
singular work. The Mirror for Magistrates. It is a collection of 
narratives of the lives of various remarkable English historical 
personages, taken, in general, with little more embellishment 



THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES. J 99 

than their reduction to a metrical form, from the common popu- 
lar chronicles ; and the idea of it appears to have been borrowed 
from a Latin work of Boccaccio's, which had been translated 
and versified many years before by Lydgate, under the title of 
The Fall of Princes. It was planned and begun (it is supposed 
about the 3^ear 1557) by Thomas Sackville, afterwards distin- 
guished as a statesman, and ennobled by the titles of Lord 
Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. But Sackville soon found himself 
obliged to relinquish the execution of his extensive design, 
which contemplated a survey of the whole range of English 
history from William the Conqueror to the end of the wars of 
the Eoses, to other hands. The two wi'iters to whom he recom- 
mended the carrying on of the work were Eichard Baldwynne, 
who was in orders, and had already published a metrical version 
of the Song of Solomon, and George Ferrers, who was a person 
of some rank, having sat in parliament in the time of Henry 
VIIL, but who had latterly been chiefly known as a composer of 
occasional interludes for the diversion of the Court. It is a trait 
of the times that, although a member of Lincoln's Inn, and 
known both as a legal and an historical author, Ferrers was in 
1552-3 appointed by Edward VI. to preside over the Christmas 
revels at the royal palace of Greenwich in the office of Lord of 
Misrule : Stow tells us that upon this occasion he "so pleasantly 
and wisely behaved himself, that the king had great delight in 
his pastimes." Baldwynne and Ferrers called other writers 
to their assistance, among whom were Thomas Churchyard, 
Phaer, the translator of Virgil, &c. ; and the book, in its first 
form and extent, was published in a quarto volume in 1559. The 
Mirror for Magistrates immediately acquired and for a consider- 
able time retained great popularity ; a second edition of it was 
published in 1563 ; a third in 1571 ; a fourth, with the addition of 
a series of new lives from the fabulous history of the early Britons, 
by John Higgins, in 1574 ; a fifth, in 1587 ; a sixth, with further 
additions, in 1610, by Eichard Nichols, assisted b}^ Thomas 
Blenerhasset (whose contributions, however, had been separately 
printed in 1578). * The copiousness of the plan, into which any 
narrative might be inserted belonging to either the historical or 
legendary part of the national annals, and that without any 
trouble in the way of connexion or adaptation, had made the 
work a receptacle for the contributions of all the ready versifiers 
of the day — a common, or parish green, as it were, on which a 
fair was held to which any one who chose might bring his wares 

* A reprint of the Mirror for Magistrates, in 2 (sometimes divided into 3) 
vols. 4to., was brought out by the late Mr. Hazlewood in 1815. 



200 ENGLISH LITERATURE i^2^D LANGUAGE. 

— or ratlier a sort of continually growing monument, or cainiy 
to which every man added his stone, or little separate specimen 
of brick and mortar, who conceived himself to have any skill in 
building the lofty rhyme. There were scarcely any limits to the 
size to which the book might have grown, except the mutability 
of the public taste, which will permit no one thing, good or bad, 
to go on for ever. The Mirror for Magistrates, however, for all 
its many authors, is of note in the history of our poetry for 
nothing else which it contains, except the portions contributed 
by its contriver Sackville, consisting only of one legend, that of 
Ilenry, Duke of Buckingham (Eichard the Third's famous ac- 
complice and victim, and grandfather of Lord Stafford, the great 
patron of the work), and the introduction, or Induction, as it is 
called, prefixed to that narrative, which however is said to have 
been originally intended to stand at the head of the whole work. 
Both for his poetical genius, and in the history of the language, 
Sackville and his two poems in the Mirror for Magistrates — 
more especially this Induction — must be considered as forming 
the connecting link or bridge between Chaucer and Spenser, 
between the Canterbury Tales and the Fairy Queen. 

Nothing is wanting to Sackville that belongs to force either of 
conception or of expression. In his own world of the sombre 
and sad, also, he is almost as great an inventor as he is a 
colourist ; and Spenser has been indebted to him for many hints, 
as well as for example and inspiration in a general sense : what 
most marks the immaturity of his style is a certain operose and 
constrained air, a stiffness and hardness of manner, like what 
we find in the works of the earliest school of the Italian painters, 
before Eaphael and Michael Angelo arose to convert the art from 
a painful repetition or mimicry of reality into a process of 
creation— from the timid slave of nature into her glorified rival. 
Of the flow and variety, the genuine spirit of light and life, that 
we have in Spenser and Shakespeare, there is little in Sackville ; 
his poetry — ponderous, gloomy, and monotonous — is still op- 
pressed by the shadows of night ; and we see that, although the 
darkness is retiring, the sun has not yet risen. 



Origin of the Eegular Drama. 

From the first introduction of dramatic representations in Eng- 
land, probably as early, at least, as the beginning of the twelfth 
century, down to the beginning of the fifteenth, or perhaps some- 
what later, the only species of drama known was that styled the 



ORIGIN OF THE REGULAR DRAMA. 201 

Miracle, or Miracle-play. The subjects of the miracle- plays were 
all taken from the histories of the Old and New Testament, or 
from the legends of saints and martyrs ; and, indeed, it is pro- 
bable that their original design was chiefly to instruct the people 
in religious knowledge. They were often acted as well as written 
by clergymen, and were exhibited in abbeys, in churches, and in 
churchyards, on Sundays or other holidays. It appears to have 
been not till some time after their first introduction that miracle- 
plays came to be annually represented under the direction and at 
the expense of the guilds or trading companies of towns, as at 
Chester and elsewhere. The characters, or dramatis personce, of 
the miracle-plays, though sometimes supernatural or legendary, 
were ahvays actual personages, historical or imaginar}'- ; and in 
that respect these primitive plays approached nearer to the regu- 
lar drama than those by which they were succeeded — the Moials, 
or j^Ioral-plaj's, in which, not a history, but an apologue was re- 
presented, and in which the characters were all allegorical. The 
moral-plays are traced back to the early part of the reign of 
Henry VI., and thev appear to have gradually arisen out of the 
miracle -plaj'-s, in which, of course, characters very nearly ap- 
proaching in their nature to the impersonated vices and virtues 
of the new species of drama must have occasionally appeared. 
The Devil of the Miracles, for example, would very naturally 
suggest the Vice of the Morals ; which latter, however, it is to 
be observed, also retained the Devil of their predecessors, v^%o 
was too amusing and popular a character to be discarded. Kor 
did the moral-plays altogether put down the miracle-plays : in 
many of the provincial towns, at least, the latter continued to be 
represented almost to as late a date as the former. Finally, l^y a 
process of natural transition very similar to that by which the 
sacred and supernatural characters of the religious drama had 
been converted into the allegorical personifications of the moral- 
plays, these last, gradually becoming less and less vague and 
shadowy, at length, about the middle of the sixteenth century, 
boldly assumed life and reality, giving birth to the first examples 
of regular tragedy and comedy. 

Both moral-plays, however, and even the more ancient miracle- 
plays, continued to be occasionally performed down to the very 
end of the sixteenth century. One of the last dramatic represent- 
ations at which Elizabeth was present, was a moral-pla3% entitled 
The Contention between Liberalit}^ and Prodigality, which was 
performed before her majesty in 1600, or 1601. This production 
was printed in 1602, and was probabl}^ written not long before 
that time : it has been said to have been the joint production of 



202 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, the last of whom died in 
1592. The only three manuscripts of the Chester miracle-plays 
now extant were written in 1600, 1604, and 1607, most probably 
while the plays still continued to be acted. There is evidence 
that the ancient annual miracle-plays were acted at Tewkesbury 
at least till 1585, at Coventry till 1591, at Newcastle till 1598, 
and at Kendal down even to the year 1603. 

As has been observed, however, by Mr. Collier, the latest and 
best historian of the English drama, the moral- plays were enabled 
to keep possession of the stage so long as they did, partly b}- 
means of the approaches they had for some time been making to 
a more improved species of composition, " and partly because, 
under the form of allegorical fiction and abstract character, the 
writers introduced matter which covertly touched upon public 
events, popular prejudices, and temporary opinions."* He men- 
tions, in particular, the moral entitled The Three Ladies of Lon- 
don, printed in 1584, and its continuation. The Three Lords and 
Three Ladies of London, which appeared in 1590 (both by R. W.), 
as belonging to this class. 



Interludes of John Heywood. 



Meanwhile, long before the earliest of these dates, the an- 
cient drama had, in other hands, assumed wholly a new form. 
Mr. Collier appears to consider the Interludes of John Heywood, 
the earliest of which must have been written before 1521 , as firsi 
exhibiting the moral-play in a state of transition to the regular 
tragedy and comedy. " John Hey wood's dramatic productions," 
he says, " almost form a class by themselves : they are neither 
miracle-plays nor moral-plays, but what may be properly and 
strictly called interludes, a species of writing of which he has a 
claim to be considered the inventor, although the term interlude 
was applied generally to theatrical productions in the reign of 
Edward IV." A notion of the nature of these compositions may 
be collected from the plot of one of them, A Merry Play betwene 
the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and neighbour Pratte, 
printed in 1533, of which Mr. Collier gives the following ac- 
count : — " A pardoner and a friar have each obtained leave of the 
curate to use his church, — the one for the exhibition of his relics, 
and the other for the delivery of a sermon — the object of both 
being the same, that of procuring money. The friar arrives first, 
and is about to commence his discourse, when the pardoner enters 
* Hist, of Dramatic Poetry, ii. 413. 



UD ALL'S RALPH ROISTER DOISTER. 203 

and disturbs him ; eacb. is desirous of being beard, and, after 
many vain attempts by force of lungs, they proceed to force of 
arms, kicking and cuffing eacb other unmercifully. The curate, 
called by the disturbance in his church, endeavours, without 
avail, to part the combatants; he therefore calls in neighbour 
Pratte to his assistance, and, while the curate seizes the friar, 
Pratte undertakes to deal with the pardoner, in order that they 
may set them in the stocks. It turns out that both the friar and 
the pardoner are too much for their assailants; and the latter, 
after a sound drubbing, are glad to come to a composition, by 
which the former are allowed quietly to depart."* Here, then, 
we have a dramatic fable, or incident at least, conducted not by 
allegorical personifications, but by characters of real life, which 
is the essential difference that distinguishes the tine tragedy or 
comedy from the mere moral. Heywood's interludes, however, 
of which there are two or three more of the same description 
with this (besides others partaking more of the allegorical cha- 
racter), are all only single acts, or, more properly, scenes, and 
exhibit, therefore, nothing more than the mere rudiments or 
embryo of the regular comedy. 



Udall's Ealph Eoister Doister. 

The earliest English comedy, properly so called, that has yet 
been discovered, is commonly considered to be that of Ealph 
Eoister Doister, the production of Nicholas Udall, an eminent 
classical scholar in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and 
one of the masters, first at Eton, and afterwards at Westminster, 
Its existence was unknown till a copy was discovered in 1818, 
which perhaps (for the title-page is gone) was not printed earlier 
than 1566, in which year Thomas Hackett is recorded in the 
register of the Stationers' Company to have had a licence for 
printing a play entitled Eauf Euyster Duster; but the play is 
quoted in Thomas Wilson's Eule of Eeason, first printed in 1551, 
so that it must have been written at least fifteen or sixteen years 
before. f This hypothesis would carry it back to about the same 
date with the earliest of Heywood's interludes ; and it certainly 
was produced while that writer was still alive and in the height 
of his popularity. It may be observed that Wilson calls Udall's 
play an interlude, which would therefore seem to have been at 
this time the common name for any dramatic composition, as, 
indeed, it appears to have been for nearly a century preceding. 
* Hist, of Dramatic Poetry, ii. 386. f See Collier, ii. 446. 



204 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

The aiitJior himself, however, in his prologue, announces it as a 
Comedy, or Interlude, and as an imitation of the classical models 
of Plautus and Terence. 

And, in truth, both in character and in plot, Ealph Roister 
Doister has every right to be regarded as a true comedy, showing 
indeed, in its execution, the rudeness of the age, but in its plan, 
and in reference to the principle upon which it is constructed, as 
regular and as complete as any comedy in the language. It is 
divided into acts and scenes, which very few of the moral-plays 
are ; and, according to Mr. Collier's estimate, the performance 
could not have been concluded in less time than about two hours 
and a half, while few of the morals would require more than 
about an hour for their representation.* The dramatis personae 
are thirteen in all, nine male and four female ; and the two prin- 
cipal ones at least — Ralph himself, a vain, thoughtless, bluster- 
ing fellow, whose ultimately baffled pursuit of the gay and rich 
widow Custance forms the action of the piece ; and his servant, 
Matthew Merry greek, a kind of flesh- and-blood representative of 
the Yice of the old moral-plays — are strongly discriminated, and 
drawn altogether with much force and spirit. The story is not 
very ingeniously involved, but it moves forward through its 
gradual development, and onwards to the catastrophe, in a suffi- 
ciently bustling, lively manner; and some of the situations, 
though the humour is rather farcical than comic, are very 
cleverly conceived and managed. The language also may be said 
to be on the whole, racy and characteristic, if not very polished. 
A few lines from a speech of one of the widow's handmaidens, 
Tibet Talkapace, in a conversation with her fellow-servants on 
the approaching marriage of their masters, may be quoted as a 
specimen : — 

And I heard our Nourse speake of an husbande to-day 

Eeady for our mistresse ; a rich man and a gay : 

And we shall go in our French hoodes every day ; 

In our silke cassocks (I warrant you) freshe and gay ; 

In our tricke ferdigev\'s, and billiments of golde, 

Brave in our sutes of chaunge, seven double folde. 

Then shall ye see Tibet, sires, treade the mosse so trimme : 

Nay, why said I treade ? ye shall see hir glide and swimme, 

Not lumperdee, clumperdee, like our spaniell Eig. 



See Collier, ii. 45. 



205 



Gammer Gurton's Needle. 

Ealpli Eoister Doister is in every way a very superior produc- 
tion to Gammer Gnrton's Needle, which, before the discovery of 
Udall's piece, had the credit of being the first regular English 
comedy. At the same time, it must be admitted that the superior 
antiquity assigned to Ealph Eoister Doister is not very conclusively 
made out. All that we know with certainty with regard to the 
date of the play is, that it was in existence in 1551. The oldest 
edition of Gammer Gurton's Needle is dated 1575 : but how long 
the play may have been composed before that year is uncertain. 
The title-page of the 1575 edition describes it as "played on the 
stage not long ago in Christ's College, in Cambiidge ;" and 
Warton, on the authority of a manuscript memorandum by Oidys, 
the eminent antiquary of the early part of the last century, says 
that it was written and first printed in 1551. Wright also, in 
his Historia Histrionica, first printed in 1669, states it as his 
opinion that it was written in the reign of Edward VI. In refu- 
tation of all this it is alleged that " it could not have been pro- 
duced so early, because J ohn Still (afterwards bishop of Bath and 
Wells), the author of it, Avas not born until 1543; and, conse- 
quently, in 1552, taking Warton's latest date, would only have 
been nine years old.* But the evidence that Bishop Still was 
the author of Gammer Gurton's Needle is exceedingly slight. 
The play is merely stated on the title-page to have been ' ' made 
by Mr. S., Master of Arts ;" and even if there was, as is asserted, 
no other Master of Arts of Christ's College whose name began 
with S. at the time when this title-page was printed, the author 
of the play is not stated to have been of that college, nor, if he 
were, is it necessary to assume that he was living in 1575. On 
the whole, therefore, while there is no proof that Ealph Eoister 
Doister is older that the year 1551, it is by no means certain 
that Gammer Gurton's Needle was not written in that same 
year. 

This " right pithy, pleasant, and merie comedie," as it is 
designated on the title-page, is, like Udall's play, regularly 
divided into acts and scenes, and, like it too, is written in rhyme 
— the language and versification being, on the whole, perhaps 
rather more easy than flowing — a circumstance which, more than 
any external evidence that has been produced, would incline us 
to assign it to a somewhat later date. But it is in all respects 
a very tame and poor performance — the plot, if so it can be 
* Collier, ii. 444. 



206 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

called, meagre to insipidity and silliness, the characters only a 
few slightly distinguished varieties of the lowest life, and the 
dialogue in general as feeble and undramatic as the merest 
monotony can make it. Its merriment is of the coarsest and 
most boisterous description, even where it is not otherwise offen- 
sive ; but the principal ornament wherewith the author endea- 
vours to enliven his style is a brutal filth and grossness of 
expression, which is the more astounding when we consider that 
the piece was the production, in all probability, of a clergyman 
at least, if not of one who afterwards became a bishop, and that 
it was certainly represented before a learned and grave univer- 
sity. There is nothing of the same high seasoning in Ealph 
Eoister Bolster, though that play seems to have been intended 
only for the amusement of a common London audience. The 
Second Act of Gammer Gurton's Needle is introduced by a song, 

I cannot eat but little meat, 
My stomach is not good, &c. 

which is the best thing in the whole play, and which is well 
known from having been quoted by Warton, who describes it as 
the earliest chanson a hoire, or drinking ballad, of any merit in the 
language ; and observes that " it has a vein of ease and humour 
which we should not expect to have been inspired by the simjole 
beverage of those times." But this song is most probably not by 
the author of the play : it appears to be merely a portion of a 
popular song of the time, which is found elsewhere complete, and 
has recently been so printed, from a MS. of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, by Dr. Dyce, in his edition of Skelton.* 



MiSOGONUS. 

Probably of earlier date than Gammer Gurton's Needle, is 
another example of the regular drama, which, like Ealph Eoister 
Bolster, has been but lately recovered, a play entitled Misogonus, 
the only copy of which is in manuscript, and is dated 1577. An 
allusion, however, in the course of the dialogue, would seem to 
prove that the play must have been composed about the year 
1560. To the prologue is appended the name of Thomas 
Eychardes, who has therefore been assumed to be the author. 
The play, as contained in the manuscript, consists only of the 

* See Account of Skelton and his Writings, vol. i. pp. 7 — 9. Mr. Dyce 
states that the MS. from which he has printed the song is certainly of an 
earlier date thaD the oldest-known edition of the play (1575). 



BALE'S KYNGE JOHAN. 207 

unusual number of four acts, but tbe story, nevertheless, appears 
to be completed. The piece is written throughout in rhyming 
quatrains, not couplets, and the language would indicate it to 
be of about the same date with Gammer Gurton's Needle. It 
contains a song, which for fluency and spirit may very well bear 
to be compared with the drinking-song in that drama. Neither 
in the contrivance and conduct of the plot, however, nor in the 
force with which the characters are exhibited, does it evince the 
same free and skilful hand with Ealph Eoister Doister, although 
it is interesting for some of the illustrations which it affords of 
the manners of the time. 



Chronicle Histories : — Bale's Kynge Johan ; etc. 

If the regular drama thus made its first appearance among us 
in the form of comedy, the tragic muse was at least not far 
behind. There is some ground for supposing, indeed, that one 
species of the graver drama of real life may have begun to emerge 
rather sooner than comedy out of the shadowy world of the old 
allegorical representations ; that, namely, which was long distin- 
guished from both comedy and tragedy by the name of History, 
or Chronicle History, consisting, to adopt Mr. Collier's defini- 
tion, " of certain passages or events detailed by annalists put 
into a dramatic form, often without regard to the course in which 
they happened ; the author sacrificing chronology, situation, and 
circumstance, to the superior object of producing an attractive 
play."* Of what may be called at least the transition from 
the moral-play to the history, we have an example in Bale's 
lately recovered drama of Kynge Johan, j written in all proba- 
bility some years before the middle of the sixteenth century, in 
which, while many of the characters are still allegorical abstrac- 
tions, others are real personages ; King John himself. Pope Inno- 
cent, Cardinal Pandulphus, Stephen Langton, and other histo- 
rical figures moving about in odd intermixture with such mere 
notional spectres as the Widowed Britannia, Imperial Majesty, 
Nobility, Clergy, Civil Order, Treason, Verity, and Sedition. 
The play is accordingly described by Mr. Collier, the editor, as 
occupying an intermediate place between moralities and histo- 
rical plays; and "it is," he adds, "the only known existing 
specimen of that species of composition of so early a date." 

* Hist. Dram. Poet. ii. p. 414. 

t Published by the Camden Society, 4to. 1838, under the care of Mr. 
ColUer. 



2U8 ENGLISH LITEKATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Tragedy op Gorboduc. — Blank Yerse. 

But the era of genuine tragedies and historical plays had 
already commenced some years before these last-mentioned pieces 
saw the light. On the 18th of January, 1562, was "shown 
before the Queen's most excellent Majest}^" as the old title-pages 
of the printed play inform us, " in her Highness' Court of White- 
hall, by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple," the Tragedy of 
■Gorboduc, otherwise entitled the Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, 
the production of the same Thomas Sackville who has already 
engaged our attention as by far the most remarkable writer in 
The Mirror for Magistrates, and of Thomas Norton, who is said to 
have been a puritan clergyman, and who had already acquired 
a poetic reputation, though in a different province of the land of 
song, as one of the coadjutors of Sternhold and Hopkins in their 
metrical version of the Psalms. On the title-page of the first 
edition, printed in 1565, which, however, was surreptitious, it is 
stated that the three first acts were written by Norton, and the 
two last by Sackville ; and, although this announcement was 
afterwards withdrawn, it was never expressly contradicted, and 
it is not improbable that it may have a general foundation of 
truth. It must be confessed, however, that no change of style 
gives any indication which it is easy to detect of a succession of 
hands ; and that, judging by this criterion, we should rather be 
led to infer that, in whatever way the two writers contrived to 
combine their labours, whether by the one retouching and 
improving what the other had rough- sketched, or by the one 
taking the quieter and humbler, the other the more im- 
passioned, scenes or portions of the dialogue, they pursued the 
same method throughout the piece. Charles Lamb expresses 
himself " willing to believe that Lord Buckhurst supplied the 
more Adtal parts."* At the same time he observes that " the 
style of this old play is stiff and cumbersome, like the dresses 
of its times ;" and that, though there may be flesh and blood 
underneath, we cannot get at it. In truth, Gorboduc is a drama 
only in form. In spirit and manner it is wholly undramatic. 
The story has no dramatic capabilities, no evolution either of 
action or of character, although it affords some opportunities for 
description and eloquent declamation ; neither was there any- 
thing of specially dramatic aptitude in the genius of Sackville 
(to whom we may safely attribute whatever is most meritorious 
in the composition), any more than there would appear to have 
been in Spenser or in Milton, illustrious as they both stand in 
* Specimens of Eng. Dram. Poets, i. 6 (edit, of 1835). 



TRAGEDY OF GORBODUC 209 

the front line of the poets of tlieir country and of the world. 
Gorboduc, accordingly, is a most unaffecting and uninteresting 
tragedy ; as would also be the noblest book of the Fairy Queen 
or of Paradise Lost — the portion of either poem that soars the 
highest — if it were to be attempted to be transformed into a drama 
by merely being divided into acts and scenes, and cut up into the 
outward semblance of dialogue. In whatever abundance all else 
of poetry might be outpoured, the spirit of dialogue and of dra- 
matic action would not be there. Gorboduc, however, though a 
dull play, is in some other respects a remarkable production for 
the time. The language is not dramatic, but it is throughout 
singularly correct, easy, and perspicuous ; in many parts it is even 
elevated and poetical ; and there are some passages of strong 
painting not unworthy of the hand to which we owe the Induc- 
tion to the Legend of the Duke of Buckiugham in the Mirror for 
Magistrates. The piece has accordingly won much applause in 
quarters where there was little feeling of the true spirit of dra- 
matic writing as the exposition of passion in action, and where 
the chief thing demanded in a tragedy was a certain orderly 
pomp of expression, and monotonous respectability of sentiment, 
to fill the ear, and tranquillize rather than excite and disturb the 
mind. One peculiarity of the more ancient national drama 
retained in Gorboduc is the introduction, before every act, of 
a piece of machinery called the Damb Show, in which was 
shadowed forth, by a sort of allegorical exhibition, the part of 
the story that was immediately to follow. This custom survived 
on the English stage down to a considerably later date : the 
reader may remember that Shakespeare, though he rejected it in 
his own dramas, has introduced the play acted before the King 
and Queen in Hamlet by such a prefigurative dumb show.* 

Another expedient, which Shakespeare has also on two occasions 
made use of, namely, the assistance of a chorus, is also adopted 
in Gorboduc : but rather by way of mere decoration, and to 
keep the stage from being at any time empty, as in the old 
Greek drama, than to carry forward or even to explain the 

* Besides tlie original 1565 edition of Gorboduc, there was another in 1569 
Or 1570, and a third in 1590. It was again reprinted in 1736 ; and it has also 
appeared in all the editions of Dodsley's Old Plays, 1744. 1780, and 1825. It 
has now been edited for the Shakespearian Society by Mr. W. D. Cooper, in 
the same volume with Ealph Eoister Doister. Mr. Cooper has shown that the 
edition of. 1590 was not, as had been supposed, an exact reprint of that of 
1505. He has also given us elaborate biographies both of Norton and of 
Sackville, in the latter of which he has shown that Sackville, who died sud- 
denly at the Council- table in 1608, was born in 1536, and not in 1527, as com- 
monly supposed. 

P 



210 ENGLISH LITEKATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

action, as in Henry the Tifth and Pericles. It consists, to 
quote the description given by Warton, " of Four Ancient and 
Sage Men of Britain, who regularly close every act, the last 
excepted, with an ode in long-lined stanzas, drawing back the 
attention of the audience to the substance of what has just passed, 
and illustrating it by recapitulatory moral reflections and poetical 
or historical allusions."* These effusions of the chorus are all in 
rhyme, as being intended to be of the same lyrical character with 
those in the Greek plays ; but the dialogue in the rest of the 
piece is in blank verse, of the employment of which in dramatic 
composition it affords the earliest known instance in the lan- 
guage. The first modern experiment in this " strange metre," 
as it was then called, had, as has already been noticed, been 
made only a few years before by Lord Surrey, in his translation of 
the Second and Fourth Books of the ^neid, which was published 
4n 1557, but must have been written more than ten years before, 
Surrey having been put to death in January, 1547. In the mean 
time the new species of verse had been cultivated in several 
original compositions by Nicholas Grimoald, from whom, in the 
opinion of Warton, the rude model exhibited by Surrey received 
"new strength, elegance, and modulation."*}" G-rimoald's pieces 
in blank verse were first printed in 1557, along with Surrey's 
translation, in Tottel's collection entitled Songs and Sonnets of 
Uncertain Authors ; and we are not aware that there was any 
more English blank verse written or given to the world till the 
production of Gorboduc. In that case, Sackville would stand 
as our third writer in this species of verse ; in the use of which 
also, he may be admitted to have surpassed Grimoald fully as 
much as the latter improved upon Surrey. Indeed, it may be 
said to have been Gorboduc that really established blank verse 
in the language ; for its employment from the time of the appear- 
ance of that tragedy became common in dramatic composition, 
while in other kinds of poetry, notwithstanding two or three 
early attempts, it never made head against rhyme, nor acquired 
any popularity, till it was brought into repute by the Paradise 
Lost, published a full century after Sackville' s play. Even in 
dramatic composition the use of blank verse appears to have been 
for some time confined to pieces not intended for popular re- 
presentation. 

* Hist, of Eng. Poet. iv. 181. f Ibid. iii. 346. 



211 

Other Early Dramas. 

Among the very few original plays of this period that have come 
down to US is one entitled Damon and Pytheas, which was acted 
before the queen at Christ Church, Oxford, in September, 1566, 
the production of Eichard Edwards, who, in the general estima- 
tion of his contemporaries, seems to have been accounted the 
greatest dramatic genius of his day, at least in the comic style. 
His Damon and Pytheas does not justify their laudation to a 
modern taste ; it is a mixture of comedy and tragedy, between 
which it would be hard to decide whether the grave writing or 
the gay is the rudest and dullest. The play is in rhyme, but 
some variety is produced by the measure or length of the line 
being occasionally changed. Mr. Collier thinks that the notoriety 
Edwards attained may probably have been in great part owing 
to the novelty of his subjects ; Damon and Pytheas being one of 
the earliest attempts to bring stories from profane history upon 
the English stage. Edwards, however, besides his plays, wrote 
many other things in verse, some of which have an ease, and 
even an elegance, that neither Surrey himself nor any other 
writer of that age has excelled. Most of these shorter composi- 
tions are contained in the miscellany called the Paradise of Dainty 
Devices, which, indeed, is stated on the title-page to have been 
" devised and written for the most part " by Edwards, who had, 
however, been dead ten years when the first edition appeared in 
1576. Among them are the very beautiful and tender lines, 
which have been often reprinted, in illustration of Terence's 
apophthegm, — 

" Amantium ir£e amoris redintegratio est ;" 

or, as it is here rendered in the burthen of each stanza, — 

" The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love." 

Edwards, who, towards the end of his life, was appointed one of 
the gentlemen of the Chapel Eoyal and master of the qu.een's 
singing-boys, "united," says Warton, " all those arts and accom- 
plishments which minister to popular pleasantry : he was the 
first fiddle, the most fashionable sonnetteer, the readiest rhymer, 
and the most facetious mimic, of the court."* Another surviving 
play produced during this interval is the Tragedy of Tancred 
and Gismund, founded upon Boccaccio's well-known story, which 
was presented before Elizabeth at the Inner Temple in 1568, the 

* Hist, of Enj?. Poet. iv. 110. 



212 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

five acts of which it consists being seyerally written by five 
gentlemen of the society, of whom one, the author of the third 
act, was Christopher Hatton, afterwards the celebrated dancing 
lord chancellor. The play, however, was not printed till 1592, 
when Robert Wilmot, the writer of the fifth act, gave it to the 
world, as the title-page declares, " newly revived, and polished 
according to the decorum of these days." The meaning of this 
announcement, Mr. Collier conceives to be, that the piece was in 
the first instance composed in rhyme ; but, rhj^med plays having 
by the year 1592 gone out of fashion even on the public stage, 
AVilmot's reviving and polishing consisted chiefly in cutting off 
many of the " tags to the lines," or turning them differently. 
The tragedy of Tancred and Gismund, which, like Gorboduc, has 
a dumb show at the commencement and a chorus at the close of 
every act, is, he observes, " the earliest English play extant the 
plot of which is known to be derived from an Italian novel."* 
To this earliest stage in the history of the re(>,Tilar drama belong, 
finally, some plays translated or adapted from the ancient and 
from foreign languages, which doubtless also contributed to 
excite and give an impulse to the national taste and genius in 
this department. 



Second Stage of the Eegular Drama : — Peele ; Greene. 

It thus appears that numerous pieces entitled by their form to 
be accounted as belonging to the regular drama had been pro- 
duced before the year 1580 ; but nevertheless no dramatic work 
had yet been written which can be said to have taken its place 
in our literature, or to have almost any interest for succeeding 
generations on account of its intrinsic merits and apart from its 
mere antiquity. The next ten years disclose a new scene. 
Within that space a crowd of dramatists arose whose writings 
still form a portion of our living poetry, and present the regular 
drama, no longer only painfully struggling into the outward 
shape proper to that species of composition, but having the 
breath of life breathed into it, and beginning to throb and stir 
with the pulsations of genuine passion. We can only here 
shortly notice some of the chief names in this numerous company 
of our early diamatists, properly so called. One to whom much 
attention has been recently directed is George Peele, the first of 
whose dramatic productions, The Arraignment of Paris, a sort 

* Hist. Dram. Poet. iii. 13. 



PEELE; GREENE. 213 

of masque or pageant wliich had been represented before the 
queen, was printed anonymously in 1584. But Peele's most 
celebrated drama is his Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, 
first published in 1599, two or three years after the author's 
death. This play Mr. Campbell has called " the earliest fountain 
of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry ;" 
and he adds, "there is no such sweetness of versification and 
imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakespeare."* 
David and Bethsabe was, in all probability, written not anteiior 
to Shakespeare, but after he had been at least six or seven yeai'S 
a writer for the stage, and had produced perhaps ten or twelve 
of his plays, including some of those in which, to pass over all 
other and higher things, the music of the verse has ever been 
accounted the most perfect and delicious. We know at least 
that The Midsummer iS'ight's Dream, Eomeo and Juliet, The 
Merchant of Venice, Eichard II., King John, and Eichard III., 
were all written and acted, if not all printed, before Peele's play 
was given to the world. But, independently of this considera- 
tion, it must be admitted that the best of Peele's blank verse, 
though smooth and flowing, and sometimes tastefully decorated 
with the embellishments of a learned and imitative fancy, is both 
deficient in richness or even variety of modulation, and without 
any pretensions to the force and fire of original poetic genius. 
Contemporary with Peele was Eobert Greene, the author of 
five plays, besides one written in conjunction with a friend. 
Greene died in 1592, and he appears only to have begun to 
write for the stage about 1687. Mr. Collier thinks that, in 
facility of expression, and in the flow of his blank verse, he is 
not to be placed below Peele. But Greene's most characteristic 
attribute is his turn for merriment, of which Peele in his dramatic 
productions shows little or nothing. His comedy, or farce rather, 
is no doubt usually coarse enough, but the turbid stream flows 
at least freely and abundantly. Among his plaj^s is a curious 
one on the subject of the History of Friar Bacon and Friar 
Bungay, which is supposed to have been written in 1588 or 1589, 
though first published in 1594. This, however, is not so much 
a story of diablerie as of mere legerdemain, mixed, like all the 
rest of Greene's pieces, with a good deal of farcical incident and 
dialogue ; even the catastrophe, in which one of the characters is 
carried off to hell, being so managed as to impart no supernatural 
interest to the drama. 

* Spec, of Eng. Poet. i. 140. 



214 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE 

Marlow. 

Of a different and far higher order of poetical and dramatic 
character is another play of this date upon a similar subject, the 
Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, by 
jdhristopher Marlow. Marlow died at an early age in 1593, the 
year after Greene, and three or four years before Peele. He had 
been a writer for the stage at least since 1586, in which year, or 
before, was brought out the play of Tamburlaine the Great, his 
claim to the authorship of which has been conclusively established 
by Mr. Collier, who has further shown that this was the first 
play written in blank verse that was exhibited on the public 
stage.* " Marlow' s mighty line " has been celebrated by Ben 
Jonson in his famous verses on Shakespeare ; but Drayton, the 
author of the Polyolbion, has extolled him in the most glowing 
description, — in words the most worthy of the theme : — 

Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs, 
Had in him those brave. translunaiy things 
That the first poets had : his raptures were 
All air and fire, which made his verses clear : 
For that fine madness still he did retain, 
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. f 

Marlow is, by nearly universal admission, our greatest dramatic 
writer before Shakespeare. He is frequently, indeed, turgid and 
bombastic, especially in his earliest play, Tamburlaine the Great, 
which has just been mentioned, where his fire, it must be con- 
fessed, sometimes blazes out of all bounds and becomes a mere 
wasting conflagration — sometimes only raves in a furious storm 
of sound, filling the ear without any other effect. But in his fits 
of truer inspiration, all the magic of terror, pathos, and beauty 
flashes from him in streams. The gradual accumulation of the 
agonies of Faustus, in the concluding scene of that play, as the 
moment of his awful fate comes nearer and nearer, powerfully 
drawn as it is, is far from being one of those coarse pictures of 
wretchedness that merely oppress us with horror: the most 
admirable skill is applied throughout in balancing that emotion 
by sympathy and even respect for the sufferer, — 

■ for he was a scholar once admired 



For wondrous knowledge in our German schools,- 



* Hist, Dram. Poet. ill. pp. 107—126. 

t Elegy, " To my dearly beloved friend Henry Eeynolds, Of Poets and 

Poesy." 



LTLY. 215 

and yet without disturbing our acquiescence in the justice of his 
doom; till we close the book, saddened, indeed, but not dis- 
satisfied, vdih. the pitying but still tributary and almost consoling 
words of the Chorus on our hearts, — 

Cut is the braucli that might have grown full straight, 

Aud burned is Apollo's lam'el-bongh 

That sometime grew within this learned man. 

Still finer, perhaps, is the conclusion of another of Marlow's 
dramas — his tragedy of Edward the Second. " The reluctant 
pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward," says Charles Lamb, 
"furnished hints which Shakespeare scarce improved in his 
Eichard the Second ; and the death-scene of Marlow's king moves 
pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which 
I am acquainted."* Much splendour of poetry, also, is expended 
upon the delineation of Barabas, in The Eich Jew of Malta ; but 
Marlow's Jew, as Lamb has observed, "does not approach so 
near to Shakespeare's [in the Merchant of Venice] as his Edward 
the Second." We are more reminded of some of Barabas's 
speeches by the magnificent declamation of Mammon in Jonson's 
AlchjTuist. 



Lyly; Kyd; Lodge. 



Marlow, Greene, and Peele are the most noted names among 
those of our dramatists who belong exclusively to the age of 
Elizabeth ; but some others that have less modei-n celebrity may 
perhaps be placed at least on the same line with the two latter. 
John Lyly, the Euphuist, as he is called, from one of his prose 
works, which will be noticed presently, is, as a poet, in his 
happiest efforts, elegant and fanciful ; but his genius was better 
suited for the lighter kinds of lyric poetry than for the drama. 
He is the author of nine di'amatic pieces, but of these seven are 
in prose, and only one in rhyme and one in blank verse. All of 
them, according to Mr. Collier, " seem to have been wi'itten for 
court entertainments, although they were also performed at thea- 
tres, most usually by the children of St. Paul's and the Eevels." 
They were fitter, it might be added, for beguiling the listless- 
ness of courts than for the entertainment of a popular audience, 
athirst for action and passion, and very indifferent to mere 
ingenuities of style. All poetical readers, however, remember 
some songs and other short pieces of verse with which some of 
* Spec, of Eng. Dram. Poets, i, 31. 



216 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

them are interspersed, particularly a delicate little anacreontic 
in that entitled Alexander and Campaspe, beginning — 

Cupid and my Campaspe played 
At cards for kisses, &c. 

Mr. Collier observes that Malone must have spoken from a very 
superficial acquaintance with Lyly's works when he contends 
that his plays are comparatively free from those affected conceits 
and remote allusions that characterise most of his other produc- 
tions. Thomas Kyd, the author of the two plays of Jeronimo 
and the Sj)anisli Tragedy (which is a continuation of the former :, 
besides a translation of another piece from the French, appears 
to be called Sporting Kyd by Jonson, in his verses on Shake- 
speare, in allusion merely to his name. There is, at least, 
nothing particularly sportive in the little that has come down to 
us from his pen. Kyd was a considerable master of language ; 
but his rank as a dramatist is not very easily settled, seeing that 
there is much doubt as to his claims to the authorship of by far 
the most striking passages in the Spanish Tragedy, the best of 
his two plays. Lamb, quoting the scenes in question, describes 
them as " the very salt of the old play," which, without them, 
he adds, " is but a caput mortuumy It has been generally assumed 
that they were added by Ben Jonson, who certainl}^ was employed 
to make some additions to this play ; and Mr. Collier attributes 
them to him as if the point did not admit of a doubt — acknow- 
ledging, however, that they represent Jonson in a new light, and 
that " certainly there is nothing in his own entire plays equalling 
in pathetic beauty some of his contributions to the Spanish 
Tragedy." IS'evertheless, it does not seem to be perfectly clear 
that the supposed contributions by another hand might not have 
been the work of Kyd himself. Lamb says, " There is nothing 
in the undoubted pla^^s of Jonson which would authorise us to 
suppose that he could have supplied the scenes in question. I 
should suspect the agency of some ' more potent spirit.' Webster 
might have furnished them. They are full of that wild, solemn, 
preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess of 
Malfy." The last of these early diamatists we shall notice, 
Thomas Lodge, who was born about 1656, and began to write for 
the stage about 1580, is placed by Mr. Collier "in a rank 
superior to Greene, but in some respects inferior to Kyd." His 
principal dramatic work is entitled The Wounds of Civil War, 
lively set forth in the true Tragedies of Marius and Sylla ; and 
is written in blank verse with a mixture of rhyme. It shows 
him, Mr. Collier thinks, to have unquestionably the advantage 



KYD; LODGE. 217 

ever Kyd as a drawer of character, thongh not equalling that 
writer in general vigour and boldness of poetic conception. 
His blank verse is also much more monotonous than that of Kyd. 
Another strange drama in rhyme, written by Lodge in conjunc- 
tion with Greene, is entitled A Looking-glass for London and 
England, and has for its object to put down the puritanical out- 
cry against the immorality of the stage, which it attempts to 
accomplish by a grotesque application to the city of London of 
the Scriptural story of Nineveh. The whole performance, in 
Mr. Collier's opinion, "is wearisomely dull, although the authors 
have endeavoured to lighten the weight by the introduction of 
scenes of driinken buffoonery between ' a clown and his crew of 
ruffians,' and between the same clown and a person disguised as 
the devil, in order to frighten him, but who is detected and well 
beaten." Mr. Hallam, however, pronounces that there is great 
talent shown in this play, "though upon a very strange 
canvass."* Lodge, who was an eminent physician, has left a 
considerable quantity of other poetry besides his plays, partly in 
the form of novels or tales, partly in shorter pieces, many of 
which may be found in the miscellany called England's Helicon, 
from which a few of them have been extracted by Mr. Ellis, in 
his Specimens. They are, perhaps, on the whole, more credit- 
able to his poetical powers than his dramatic performances. He 
is also the author of several short works in prose, sometimes 
interspersed with verse. One of his prose tales, first printed in 
1590, under the title of Eosalynde : Euphues' Golden Legacie, 
found in his cell at Silextra (for Lodge was one of Lyly's 
imitators), is famous as the source from which Shakespeare 
appears to have taken the story of his As You Like It. " Of 
this production it may be said," observes Mr. Collier, " that our 
admiration of many portions of it will not be diminished by a 
comparison with the work of our great dramatist,"! 

It is woi-thy of remark, that all these founders and first 
builders-up of the regular drama in England were, nearly if not 
absolutely without an exception, classical scholars and men who 
had received a university education. Nicholas Udall was of 
Corpus Christi College, Oxford ; John Still (if he is to be con- 
sidered the author of Gammer Gurton's Needle) was of Christ's 
College, Cambridge ; Sackville was educated at both universities ; 
so was Gascoigne ; Eichard Edwards was of Corpus Christi, 
Oxford ; Marlow was of Benet College, Cambridge ; Greene, of 

* Literature of Eur. ii. 274. 

t Hist, of Dram. Poet. iii. 213. — See upon this subject the Introductory 
Notice to As You Like It in Knight's Shakspere, vol. iii. 247 — 265. 



218 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

St: John's, Cambridge ; Peele, of Christ's Chnrch, Oxford ; Lyly, 
of Magdalen College, and Lodge of Trinity College, in the same 
university. Kyd was also probably a university man, though 
we know nothing of his private history. To the training 
received by these writers the drama that arose among ns after 
the middle of the sixteenth century may be considered to owe 
not only its form, but in part also its spirit, which, had a learned 
and classical tinge from the first, that never entirely wore out. 
The diction of the works of all these dramatists betrays their 
scholarship ; and they have left upon the language of our higher 
drama, and indeed of our blank verse in general, of which they were 
the main creators, an impress of Latinity, which, it can scarcely 
be doubted, our vigorous but still homely and unsonorous Gothic 
speech needed to fit it for the requirements of that species of 
composition. Fortunately, however, the greatest and most 
influential of them were not mere men of books and readers of 
Greek and Latin. Greene and Peele and Maiiow all spent the 
noon of their days (none of them saw any afternoon) in the 
busiest haunts of social life, sounding in their reckless course all 
the depths of human experience, and drinking the cup of passion, 
and also of suffering, to the dregs. And of their great successors, 
those who carried the drama to its height among us in the next 
age, while some were also accomplished scholars, all were men 
of the world — men who knew their brother-men by an actual 
and intimate intercourse with them in their most natural and 
open-hearted moods, and over a remarkably extended range of 
conditions. We know, from even the scanty fragments of their 
history that have come down to us, that Shakespeare and 
Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher all lived much in the open 
air of society, and mingled with all ranks from the highest to 
the lowest; some of them, indeed, having known what it was 
actually to belong to classes very far removed from each other at 
different periods of their lives. But we should have gathered, 
though no other record or tradition had told us, that they must 
have been men of this genuine and manifold experience from 
the drama alone which they have bequeathed to us,- — ^various, 
rich, and glowing as that is, even as life itself. 



219 



Earlier Elizabethan Prose : — Lyly ; Sidney ; Spenser ; 
Nash; etc. 

Before leaving the earlier part of the reign of Elizabeth, a few 
of the more remarkable writers in prose who had risen into 
notice before the year 1590 may be mentioned. The singular 
affectation known by the name of Euphuism was, like some other 
celebrated absurdities, the invention of a man of true genius — 
John Lyly, noticed above as a dramatist and poet — the first part 
of whose prose romance of Euphues appeared in 1578 or 1579. 
" Our nation," says Sir Henry Blount, in the preface to a collec- 
tion of some of Lyly's dramatic pieces which he published in 
1632, " are in his debt for a new English which he taught them. 
Euphues and his England* began first that language; all our 
ladies were then his scholars ; and that beauty in court which 
could not parley Euphuism — that is to say, who was unable to 
converse in that pure and reformed English, which he had 
formed his work to be the standard of — was as little regarded as 
she which now there speaks not French." Some notion of this 
"pure and reformed English" has been made familiar to the 
reader of our day by the great modern pen that has called back 
to life so much of the long-vanished past, though the discourse 
of Sir Piercie Shafton, in the Monastery, is rather a caricature 
than a fair sample of Euphuism. Doubtless, it often became a 
purely silly and pitiable aifair in the mouths of the courtiers, 
male and female ; but in Lyly's own writings, and in those of 
his lettered imitators, of whom he had several, and some of no 
common talent, it was only fantastic and extravagant, and 
opposed to truth, nature, good sense, and manliness. Pedantic 
and far-fetched allusion, elaborate indirectness, a cloying smooth- 
ness and drowsy monotony of diction, alliteration, punning, and 
other such puerilities, — these are the main ingredients of 
Euphuism ; which do not, however, exclude a good deal of wit, 
fancy, and prettiness, occasionally, both in the expression and 
the thought. Although Lyly, in his verse as well as in his 
prose, is always artificial to excess, his ingenuity and finished 
elegance are frequently very captivating. Perhaps, indeed, our 
language is, after all, indebted to this writer and his Euphuism 
for not a little of its present euphony. From the strictures 
Shakespeare, in Love's Labour's Lost, makes Holofernes pass on 
the mode of speaking of his Euphuist, Don Adrian© de Armado 

* This is the title of the second part of the Euphues, published in 1581. 
T he first part is entitled Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit. 



220 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

— " a man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight — that hath a 
mint of phrases in his brain — one whom the music of his own 
vain tongue doth ravish like enchanting harmony " — it should 
almost seem that the now universally adopted pronunciation of 
many of our words was first introduced by such persons at this 
refining " child of fancy :" — " I abhor such fanatical fantasms, 
such, insociable and point-device companions ; such rackers of 
orthography as to speak dout, fine, when he should say douht ; det, 
when he should pronounce debt, d, e, b, t ; not d, e, t : he clepeth a 
calf, cauf ; half, hauf ; neighbour vocatur nebour ; neigh, abbi'eviated 
ne ; this is abhominable (which he would call abominable) : it 
insinuateth me of insanie." Here, however, the all-seeing poet 
laughs rather at the pedantic schoolmaster than at the fantastic 
knight; and the euphuistic pronunciation which he makes 
Holofernes so indignantly criticise was most probably his own 
and that of the generality of his educated contemporaries. 

A renowned English prose classic of this age, who made Lyly's 
affectations the subject of his ridicule some years before Shake- 
speare, but who also perhaps was not blind to his better qualities, 
and did not disdain to adopt some of his reforms in. the language, 
if not to imitate even some of the peculiarities of his style, was 
Sir Philip Sidney, the illustrious author of the Arcadia. Sidney, 
who was born in 1554, does not appear to have sent anything to 
the press during his short and brilliant life, which was terminated 
by the wound, he received at the battle of Zutphen, in 1586; 
but he was probably well known, nevertheless, at least as a 
writer of poetry, some years before his lamented death. Putten- 
ham, whose Art of English Poesy, at whatever time it may have 
been written, was published before any work of Sidney's had been 
printed, so far as can now be discovered, mentions him as one of 
the best and most famous 'writers of the age " for eclogue and 
pastoral poesy." The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, as Sidney's 
principal work had been affectionately designated by himself, in 
compliment to his sister, to whom it was inscribed — the " fair, 
and good, and learned" lady, afterwards celebrated by Ben 
Jonson as " the subject of all verse " — was not given to the world 
even in part till 1590, nor completely till 1593. His collection 
of sonnets and songs entitled Astrophel and Stella, first appeared 
in 1591, and his other most celebrated piece in prose, The 
Defence of Poesy, in 1595. The production in which he satirises 
the affectation and pedantry of the modern corrupters of the 
vernacular tongue is a sort of masque, supposed to pass before 
Queen Elizabeth in Wanstead garden, in which, among other 
characters, a village schoolmaster called Eombus appears, and 






GREENE. 221 

declaims in a jargon not unlike that of Shakespeare's Holofernes. 
Sidney's own prose is the most flowing and poetical that had yet 
been written in English ; but its graces are rather those of artful 
elaboration than of a vivid natural expressiveness. The thought, 
in fact, is generally more poetical than the language ; it is a 
spirit of poetry encased in a rhetorical form. Yet, notwithstand- 
ing the conceits into which it frequently runs — and which, after 
all, are mostly rather the frolics of a nimble wit, somewhat too 
solicitous of display, than the sickly perversities of a coxcombical 
or effeminate taste — and, notwithstanding also some want of 
animation and variety, Sidney's is a wonderful style, always 
flexible, harmonious, and luminous, and on fit occasions rising to 
great stateliness and splendour ; while a breath of beauty and 
noble feeling lives in and exhales from the whole of his great 
work, like the fragrance from a garden of flowers. 

Among the most active occasional writers in prose, also, about 
this time were others of the poets and dramatists of the day, 
besides Lodge, who has been already mentioned as one of 
Lyly's imitators. Another of his productions, besides his tale of 
Kosalynd, which has lately attracted much attention, is a Defence 
of Stage Plays, which he published, probably in 1579, in answer 
to Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse, and of which only two 
copies are known to exist, both wanting the title-page. Greene 
was an incessant pamphleteer upon all sorts of subjects ; the list 
of his prose publications, so far as they are known, given by 
Mr. JJyce extends to between thirty and forty articles, the earliest 
being dated 1584, or eight years before his death. Morality, 
fiction, satire, blackguardism, are all mingled together in the 
stream that thus appears to have flowed without pause from his 
ready pen. " In a night and a day," says his friend Nash, 
" would he have yarked up a pamphlet as well as in seven years ; 
and glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dear 
for the very dregs of his wit."* His wit, indeed, often enough 
appears to have run to the dregs, nor is it very sparkling at the 
best ; but Greene's prose, though not in general very animated, 
is more concise and perspicuous than his habits of composition 
might lead us to expect. He has generally written from a well- 
informed or full mind, and the matter is interesting even when 
there is no particular attraction in the manner. Among his 
most cuiious pamphlets are his several tracts on the rogueries of 
London, which he describes under the name of Coney-catching 
■ — a favourite subject also with other popular writers of that day. 

* Strange News, ia answer to Gabriel Harvey's Four Letters. 



222 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

But the most remarkable of all Greene's contributions to our 
literature are bis various publications which either directly 
relate or are understood to shadow forth the history of his own 
wild and unhappy life — his tale entitled Never too Late ; or, A 
Powder of Experience, 1590 ; the second part entitled Francesco's 
Fortunes, the same year ; his Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a 
Million of Eepentance, and The Eepentance of Eobert Greene, 
Master of Arts, which both appeared, after his death, in 1592. 
Greene, as well as Lodge, we may remark, is to be reckoned 
among the Euphuists; a tale which he published in 1587, and 
which was no less than five times reprinted in the course of the 
next half- century, is entitled Menaphon; Camilla's Alarum to 
slumbering Euphues, in his melancholy cell at Silexedra, &c. ; 
and the same year he produced Euphues his Censure to Philantus ; 
wherein is presented a philosophical combat between Hector 
and Achilles, &c. But he does not appear to have persisted in 
this fashion of style. It may be noticed as curiously illustrating 
the spirit and manner of our fictitious literature at this time, 
that in his Pandosto, or. History of Dorastus and Fawnia, 
Greene, a scholar, and a Master of Arts of Cambridge, does 
not hesitate to make Bohemia an island, just as is done by 
Shakespeare in treating the same story in his Winter's Tale. 
The critics have been accustomed to instance this as one of 
the evidences of Shakespeare's ignorance, and Ben Jonson 
is recorded to have, in his conversation with Drummond of 
Plawthomden, quoted it as a proof that his great brother- 
dramatist " wanted art,* and sometimes sense." The truth is, as 
has been observed,! such deviations from fact, and other incon- 
gruities of the same character, were not minded, or attempted to 
be avoided, either in the romantic drama, or in the legends out 
of which it was formed. They are not blunders, but part and 
parcel of the fiction. The making Bohemia an island is not 
nearly so great a violation of geographical truth as other things 
in the same play are of all the proprieties and possibilities of 
chronology and history — for instance, the co-existence of a 
kingdom of Bohemia at all, or of that modem barbaric name, 
with anything so entirely belonging to the old classic world as 
the Oracle of Delphi. The story (though no earlier record of it 
has yet been discovered) is not improbably much older than 
either Shakespeare or Greene : the latter no doubt expanded and 

* Yet Jonson has elsewhere expressly commencled Shakespeare for his art. 
See his well-known verses prefixed to the first folio edition of the Plays. 

t See Notice on the Costume of the Winter's Tale in Knight's Shakspere, 
vol. iv. 



NASH. 223 

adorned it, and mainly gave it its present sliape ; but it is most 
likely that he had for his groundwork some rude popular legend 
or tradition, the characteristic middle age geography and chrono- 
logy of which he most properly did not disturb. 

But the most brilliant pamphleteer of this age was Thomas 
Nash. Nash is the author of one slight dramatic piece, mostly 
in blank verse, but partly in prose, and having also some lyrical 
poetry interspersed, called Summer's Last Will and Testament, 
which was exhibited before Queen Elizabeth at Nonsuch in 
1592; and he also assisted Marlow in his Tragedy of Dido, 
Queen of Carthage, which, although not printed till 1594, is 
supposed to have been written before 1590. But his satiric was 
of a much higher order than his dramatic talent. There never 
perhaps was poured forth such a rushing and roaring torrent of 
wit, ridicule, and invective, as in the rapid succession of pam- 
phlets which he published in the course of the year 15S9 against 
the Puritans and their famous champion (or rather knot of cham- 
pions) taking the name of Martin Mar-Prelate ; unless in those 
in which he began two years after to assail poor Gabriel Harvey, 
his persecution of and controversy with whom lasted a much 
longer time — till indeed the Archbishop of Canterbury ( Whitgift) 
interfered in 1597 to restore the peace of the realm by an order 
that all Harvey's and Nash's books should be taken wherever 
they might be found, " and that none of the said books be ever 
printed hereafter." Mr. D'Israeli has made both these contro- 
versies familiar to modern readers by his lively accounts of the 
one in his Quarrels, of the other in his Calamities, of Authors ; 
and ample specimens of the criminations and recriminations 
hurled at one another by Nash and Harvey have also been given 
by Mr. Dyce in the Life of Greene prefixed to his edition of that 
writer's dramatic and poetical works. Harvey too was a man of 
eminent talent ; but it was of a kind very different from that of 
Nash. Nash's style is remarkable for its airiness and facility ; 
clear it of its old spelling, and, unless it be for a few words and 
idioms which have now dropt out of the popular speech, it has 
quite a modern air. This may show, by-the-by, that the lan- 
guage has not altered so much since the latter part of the six- 
teenth century as the ordinary prose of that day would lead us to 
suppose ; the difference is rather that the generality of writers 
were more pedantic then than now, and sought, in a way that 
is no longer the fashion, to brocade their composition with what 
were called ink-horn terms, and outlandish phrases never used 
except in books. If they had been satisfied to write as they 
spoke, the style of that day (as we may perceive from the example 



22 1 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

of Nasii) would have in its general character considerably more 
resembled that of the present. Gabriel Harvey's mode of writing 
exhibits all the peculiarities of his age in their most exaggerated 
form. He was a great scholar — and his composition is inspired 
by the very genius of pedantry ; full of matter, full often of good 
sense, not unfrequently rising to a tone of dignity, and even 
eloquence, but always stiff, artificial, and elaborately unnatural 
to a degree which was even then unusual. We may conceive 
what sort of chance such a heavy-armed combatant, encumbered 
and oppressed by the very weapons he carried, would have in a 
war of wit with the quick, elastic, inexhaustible Nash, and the 
showering jokes and sarcasms that flashed from his easy, natural 
pen. Harvey, too, with all his merits, was both vain and 
envious ; and he had some absurdities which afforded tempting 
game for satire. 



Edmund Spenser. 



Edmund Spenser has been supposed to have come before the 
world as a poet so early as the year 1569, when some sonnets 
translated from Petrarch, which long afterwards were reprinted 
with his name, appeared in Vander jS'oodt's Theatre of World- 
lings : on the 20th of May in that year he was entered a sizer of 
Pembroke Hall. Cambridge ; and in that same year, also, an entry 
in the Books of the Treasurer of the Queen's Chamber records 
that there was "paid upon a bill signed by Mr. Secretary, dated 
at Windsor 18° Octobris, to Edmund Spenser, that brought letters 
to the Queen's Majesty from Sir Henry Korris, Knight, her 
Majesty's ambassador in France, being at Thouars in the said 
realm, for his charges the sum of 61. 13s. 4(f., over and besides 
9^. prested to him by Sir Henry Norris."* It has been sup- 
posed that this entry refers to the poet. The date 1510, given 
as that of the year of his birth upon his monument in West- 
minster Abbey, erected long after his death, is out of the ques- 
tion ; but the above-mentioned facts make it probable that he was 
bom some years before 1563, the date commonly assigned. 

He has himself commemorated the place of his birth : "At 
length," he says in his Prothaiamion, or poem on the marriages 
of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, 

* First published in Mr. Cunningham's Introduction (p. xxx.) to his Ex- 
tracts from the Accounts of the Eevels at Court, printed for the Shakespeare 
Society, 8vo. Lond. 1842. 



SPENSER, 225 

At length they all to merry London came, 
To merry London, my most kindly nurse, 
That to me gave this life's first native source, 
Though from another place I take my name, 
An house of ancient fame. 

It is commonly said, on the authority of Oldys, that lie was boru 
in East Smithfield by the Tower. It appears from the register 
of the University that he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 
1572, and that of Master of Arts in 1576. On leaving Cambridge 
lie retired for some time to the north of England. Here he ap- 
pears to have written the greater part of his Shepherd's Calendar, 
which, having previously come up to London, he published in 
1579. In the beginning of August, 1580, on the appointment of 
Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton as Lord Deputy of Ireland, he accom- 
panied his lordship to that country as his secretary; in March, 
the year following, he was appointed to the office of Clerk in the 
Irish Court of Chancery; but on Lord Grey being recalled in 
1582 Spenser probably returned with him to England. 

Of how he was employed for the next three or four years 
nothing is known ; but in 1 586 he obtained from the crown a 
grant of above 3000 acres of forfeited lands in Ireland : the grant 
is dated the 27th of July, and, if it was procured, as is not im- 
probable, through Sir Philip Sidney, it was the last kindness of 
that friend and patron, whose death took place in October of this 
year. Spenser proceeded to Ireland to take possession of his 
estate, which was a portion of the former domain of the Earl ol 
Desmond in the county of Cork ; and here he remained, residing 
in what had been the earl's castle of Kilcolman, till he returned 
to England in 1590, and published at London, in 4to., the first 
three Books of his Fairy Queen. If he had published an3^thing 
else since the Shepherd's Calendar appeared eleven yesLYs, before, it 
could only have been a poem of between four and five hundred 
lines, entitled Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly, which he 
dedicated to the Lady Carey. He has himself related, in his 
Colin Clout's Come Home Again, how he had been visited in his 
exile by the Shepherd of the Ocean, by which designation he 
means Sir Walter Ealeigh, and persuaded by him to make this 
visit to England for the purpose of having his poem printed. 
Ealeigh introduced him to Elizabeth, to whom the Fairy Queen 
was dedicated, and who in February, 1591, bestowed on the 
author a pension of 50L This great work immediately raised 
Si3enser to such celebrity, that the publisher hastened to collect 
whatever of his other poems he could find, and, under the gene- 
ral title of Complaints ; Containing sundry small poems of the 

Q 



226 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

World's Vanity ; printed together, in a 4to. volume, The Euins 
of Time, The Tears of the Muses, Virgil's Gnat, Mother Hub- 
berd's Tale, The Euins of Eome (from the French of Beliay), 
Muiopotmos (which is stated to be the only one of the pieces 
that had previously appeared), and The Visions of Petrarch, &c., 
already mentioned. Many more, it is declared, which the author 
had written in former years were not to be found. 

Spenser aj)pears to have remained in England till the begin- 
ning of the 3^ear 1592 : his Daphnaida, an elegy on the death of 
Douglas Howard, daughter of Lord Howard, and wife of Arthur 
Gorges, Esq., is dedicated to the Marchioness of Northampton in 
an address dated the 1st of January in that year, and it was 
published soon after. He then returned to Ireland, and, probably 
in the course of 1592 and 1593, there composed the series of 
eighty-eight sonnets in which he relates his courtship of the lady 
whom he at last married,* celebrating the event by a splendid 
Epithalamion. But it appears from the eightieth sonnet that he 
had already finished six Books of his Fairy Queen. His next 
publication was another 4to. volume which appeared in 1595, 
containing his Colin Clout's Come Home Again, the dedication 
of which to Raleigh is dated "From my house at Kilcolman, 
December the 27th, 1591," no doubt a misprint for 1594 ; and also 
his Astrophel, an elegy upon Sir Philip Sidney, dedicated to his 
widow, now the Countess of Essex ; together with The Mourning 
Muse of Thestylis, another poem on the same subject. The same 
year appeared, in 8vo., his sonnets, under the title of Amoretti, 
accompanied by the Epithalamion. In 1596 he paid another visit 
to England, bringing wdth him the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth 
Books of his Fairy Queen, which were published, along with a 
new edition of the preceding three books, in 4to., at London in 
that year. In the latter part of the same year appeared, in a 
volume of the same form, a reprint of his Daphnaida, together 
with his Prothalamion, or spousal verse on the marriages of the 
Ladies Elizabeth and Catharine Somerset, and his Four Hymns 
in honour of Love, of Beauty, of Heavenly Love, and of Hea- 
venly Beauty, dedicated to the Countesses of Cumberland and 
"Warwick, in an address dated Greenwich, the 1st of September, 
1596. The first two of these Hymns he states had been composed 
in the greener times of his youth ; and, although he had been 
moved by one of the two ladies to call in the same, as "having 

* She was not, as has been commonly assumed, a peasant girl, but evidently 
a gentlewoman, a person of the same social position with Spenser himself. I 
have shown this, for the first time, in Spenser and his Poetry, vol. iii. pp. 223^ 

&c. 



SPENSER. 227 

too mucli pleased those of like age and disposition, which, being 
too vehemently carried with that kind of affection, do rather 
suck out poison to their strong passion than honey to their 
honest delight," he " had been unable so to do, by reason that 
many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad." At this 
time it was still common for literary compositions of all kinds to 
be extensively circulated in manuscript, as used to be the mode 
of publication before the invention of printing. These H}/mns 
w^ere the last of his productions that he sent to the press. It 
was during this visit to England that he presented to Elizabeth, 
and probably wrote, his prose treatise entitled A View of the 
State of Ireland, written dialogue-wise between Eudoxus and 
Irenaeus ; but that work remained unprinted, till it was published 
at Dublin by Sir James Ware in 1633. 

Spenser returned to Ireland probably early in 1597 ; and was 
the next year recommended by the Queen to be sheriff of Cork ; 
but, soon after the breaking out of Tyrone's rebellion in October, 

1598, his house of Kilcolman was attacked and burned by the 
rebels, and, one child having perished in the flames, it was with 
difficulty that he made his escape with his wife and two sons. 
He arrived in England in a state of destitution ; but it seems 
unlikely that, with his talents and great reputation, his power- 
ful friends, his pension, and the rights he still retained, although 
deprived of the enjoyment of his Irish property for the moment, 
he could have been left to perish, as has been commonly said, of 
want : the breaking up of his constitution was a natural conse- 
quence of the sufferings he had lately gone through. All that we 
know, however, is that, a,fter having been ill for some time, he 
died at an inn in King Street, Westminster, on the 1 6th of January, 

1599. Two Cantos, undoubtedly genuine, of a subsequent Book 
of the Fairy Queen, and two stanzas of a third Canto, entitled Of 
Mutability, and forming part of the Legend of Constancy, were 
published in an edition of his collected works, in a folio volume, 
in 1609 ; and it may be doubted if much more of the poem was 
ever written. 

The most remarkable of Spenser's poems written before his 
great work. The Fairy Queen, are his Shepherd's Calendar and 
his Mother Hubberd's Tale. Both of these pieces are full of the 
spirit of poetry, and his genius displays itself in each in a variety 
of styles. 

The Shepherd's Calendar, though consisting of twelve distinct 
poems denominated jJEclogues, is less of a pastoral, in the or- 
dinary acceptation, than it is of a piece of polemical or party 
divinity. Spenser's shepherds are, for the most part, pastors of 



228 ENGLISH LITERATtJEE AND LANGUAGE. 

tlie churcli, or clergymen, with only pious parishioners for sheep. 
One is a good shepherd, such as Algrind, that is, the puritanical 
archbishop of Canterbury, Grindall. Another, represented in a 
much less favourable light, is Morell, that is, his famous anta- 
gonist, Elmore, or Aylmer, bishop of London. The puritanical 
spirit of some parts of the Shepherd's Calendar, probably con- 
tributed to the popularity which the poem long retained. It was 
reprinted four times during the author's lifetime, in 1581, 1586, 
1591, and 1597. Yet it is not only a very unequal composition, 
but is, in its best executed or most striking parts, far below the 
height to which Spenser afterwards learned to rise. This 
earliest work of Spenser's, however, betrays his study of 
our elder poetry as much by its diction as by other indi- 
cations : he has thickly sprinkled it with words and phrases 
which had generally ceased to be used at the time when 
it was written. This he seems to have done, not so much 
that the antiquated style might give the dialogue an air of 
rusticity proper to the speech of shepherds, but rather in the 
same spirit and design (though he has carried the practice much 
farther) in which Yirgil has done the same thing in his heroic 
poetry, that his verse might thereby be the more distinguished 
from common discourse, that it might fall upon the ears of men 
with something of the impressiveness and authority of a voice 
from other times, and that it might seem to echo, and, as it 
were, continue and prolong, the strain of the old national min- 
strelsy ; thus at once expressing his love and admiration of the 
preceding poets who had been his examples, and, in part, his 
instructors and inspirers, and making their compositions reflect 
additional light and heanjij upon his own. This is almost the 
only advantage which the later poets in any language have 
over the earlier ; and Spenser has availed himself of it more or 
less in most of his writings, though not in any later work to the 
same extent as in this first publication. 

Executed in a firmer and more matured style, and, though 
with more regularity of manner, yet also v/ith more true bold- 
ness and freedom, is the admirable Prosopopoia, as it is desig- 
nated, of the adventures of the Fox and the Ape, or Mother 
Hubberd's Tale, notwithstanding that this, too, is stated to have 
been an early production — " long sithens composed," says the 
author in his dedication of it to the Ladj^ Compton and Mont- 
eagle, " in the raw conceit of my youth." Perhaps, however, 
this was partly said to avert the offence that might be taken at 
the audacity of the satire. It has not much the appearance, 
either in manner or in matter, of the production of a very young 



SPENSER. 229 

writer. We should say that Mother Hubberd's Tale represents 
the middle age of Spenser's genius, if not of his life — the stage in 
his mental and poetical progress when his relish and power of 
the energetic had attained perfection, but the higher sense of the 
beautiful had not yet been fully developed. Such appears to be 
the natural progress of every mind that is capable of the highest 
things in both these directions : the feeling of force is first 
awakened, or at least is first matured ; the feeling of beauty is of 
later growth. With even poetical minds of a subordinate class, 
indeed, it may sometimes happen that a perception of the beau- 
tiful, and a faculty of embodying it in words, acquire a consider- 
able development without the love and capacity of the energetic 
having ever shown themselves in any unusual degree : such may 
be said to have been the case with Petrarch, to quote a remark- 
able example. But the greatest poets have all been complete 
men, with the sense of beauty, indeed, strong and exquisite, and 
crowning all their other endowments, which is what makes them 
the greatest ; but also with all other passions and powers cor- 
respondingly vigorous and active. Homer, Dante, Chaucer, 
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, were all of them mani- 
festly capable of achieving any degree of success in any other field 
as well as in poetry. They were not only poetically, but in all 
other respects, the most gifted intelligences of their times ; men 
of the largest sense, of the most penetrating insight, of the most 
general research and information ; nay, even in the most worldly 
arts and dexterities, able to cope with the ablest, whenever 
they chose to throw themselves into that game. They may not 
any of them have attained the highest degree of what is called 
worldly success ; some of them may have even been crushed by 
the force of circumstances or evil days ; Milton may have died 
in obscurity, Dante in exile ; " the vision and the faculty 
divine " may have been all the light that cheered, all the estate 
that sustained, the old age of Homer ; but no one can suppose 
that in any of these cases it was want of the requisite skill or 
talent that denied a different fortune. As for Spenser, we shall 
certainly much mistake his character if we suppose, from the 
romantic and unworldly strain of much — and that, doubtless, 
the best and highest — of his poetry, that he was anything 
resembling a mere dreamer. In the first place, the vast extent 
of his knowledge, comprehending all the learning of his age, and 
his voluminous writings, sufficiently prove that his days were 
not spent in idleness. Then, even in the matter of securing a 
livelihood and a position in the world, want of activity or eager- 
ness is a fault of which he can hardly be accused. Bred, for 



230 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

whatever reason, to no profession, it may be doubted if be bad 
any other course to take, in that age, npon tbe wbole so little 
objectionable as tbe one be adopted. Tbe scbeme of life Avitb 
wbicb be set out seems to bave been to endeavour, first of all, to 
procure for bimself, by any bonourable means, tbe leisure neces- 
sary to enable bim to cultivate and employ bis poetical powers. 
Witb tbis view be addressed bimself to Sidney, tbe cbief pro- 
fessed patron of letters in tbat day (wben, as yet, letters really 
depended to a great extent for encouragement and support upon 
tbe patronage of tbe great), hoping, through his interest, to 
obtain such a provision as be required from the bounty of the 
crown. In thus seeking to be supported at the public expense, 
and to withdraw a small portion of a fund, pretty sure to be 
otherwise wasted upon worse objects, for the modest maintenance 
of one poet, can we say that Spenser, being what he was, was 
much, or at all, to blame ? Would it have been wiser, or more 
highminded, or in any sense better, for him to have thrown 
bimself, like Greene and Nash, and tbe rest of tbat crew, upon 
the town, and, like them, wasted his fine genius in pamphleteer- 
ing and blackguardism ? He knew that he would not eat tbat 
public bread without returning to his country what she gave 
him a hundred and a thousand fold ; he who must have felt and 
known well tbat no man bad yet uttered himself in the English 
tongue so endowed for conferring upon tbe land, the language, 
and the people what all future generations would prize as their 
best inheritance, and what would contribute more than laws or 
victories, or any other glory, to maintain the name of England 
in honour and renown so long as it should be heard of among 
men. 

But he did not immediately succeed in his object. It is 
probably true, as has been commonly stated, that Bnrghley 
looked with but small regard upon the poet and his claims. 
However, be at last contrived to overcome this obstacle ; and 
eventually, as we have seen, he obtained from the crown both 
lands, offices, and a considerable pension. It is not at all likely 
tbat, circumstanced as he was at the commencement of his 
career, Spenser could in any other way have attained so soon to 
the same comparative affluence that he thus acquired. Probably 
the only respect in which he felt much dissatisfied or disap- 
pointed was in being obliged to take up his residence in Ireland, 
without which, it may have been, be would have derived little 
or no benefit from his grant of land. Mother Hubberd's Tale 
must be supposed to have been written before he obtained that 
grant. It is a sharp and shrewd satire upon the common modes 



SPENSER. 231 

of rising in the cliurcli and state ; not at all passionate or de- 
clamatory, — on the contrary, pervaded by a spirit of quiet 
hnmour, which only occasionally gives place to a tone of greater 
elevation and solemnity, but assuredly, with all its high-minded 
and even severe morality, evincing in the author anything rather 
than either ignorance of the world or indifference to the ordinary 
objects of human ambition. No one will rise from its perusal 
with the notion that Spenser was a mere rhyming visionary, or 
singing somnambulist. No ; like every other greatest poet, he 
was an eminently wise man, exercised in every field of thought, 
and rich in all knowledge — above all, in knowledge of mankind, 
the proper study of man. In this poem of Mother Hubberd's 
Tale we still find also both his puritanism and his imitation of 
Chaucer, two things which disappear altogether from his later 
poetry. Indeed, he has written nothing else so much in 
Chaucer's manner and spirit ; nor have we nearly so true a 
reflection, or rather revival, of the Chaucerian narrative 
style — at once easy and natural, clear and direct, firm and 
economical, various and always spirited — in any other modern 
verse. 

The Eairy Queen was designed by its author to be taken as an 
allegory — " a continued allegory, or dark conceit," as he calls it 
in his preliminary Letter to Ealeigh " expounding his whole 
intention in the course of this work." The allegory was even 
artificial and involved to an unusual degree ; for not only was 
the Fairy Queen, by whom the knights are sent forth upon their 
adventures, to be understood as meaning Glory in the general 
intention, but in a more particular sense she was to stand for 
"the most excellent and glorious person" of Queen Elizabeth; 
and some other eminent individual of the day appears in like 
manner to have been shadowed forth in each of the other figures. 
The most interesting allegory that was ever written carries us 
along chiefly by making us forget that it is an allegory at all. 
The charm of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is that all the persons 
and all the places in it seem real — that Christian, and Evan- 
gelist, and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. Greatheart, and the 
Giant Despair, and all the rest, are to our apprehension not 
shadows, but beings of flesh and blood ; and the Slough of 
Despond, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, the Valley of Hu- 
miliation, and the Enchanted Ground, all so many actual 
scenes or localities which we have as we read before us or 
around us. For the moral lessons that are to be got out of the 
parable, it must no doubt be considered in another manner ; but 
we speak of the delight it yields as a work of imagination. 



232 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

That is not increased, but impaired, or destroyed, by regarding 
it as an allegory — ^jnst as would be the humour of Don Quixote, 
or the marvels of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, by either 
work being so regarded. In the same manner, whoever would 
enjoy the Fairy Queen as a poem must forget that it is an 
allegory, either single or double, either compound or simple. 
Is or in truth is it even much of a story. Neither the personages 
that move in it, nor the adventures they meet with, interest us 
much. For that matter, the most ordinary novel, or a police 
report in a newspaper, may often be much more entertaining. 
One fortunate consequence of all this is, that the poem scarcely 
loses anything by the design of the author never having been 
completed, or its completion at least not having come down to 
us. What we have of it is not injured in any material respect 
by the want of the rest. This Spenser himself no doubt felt 
when he originally gave it to the world in successive portions ; — 
and it would not have mattered much although of the six Books 
he had published the three last before the three first. 

These peculiarities — the absence of an interesting story or 
concatenation of incidents, and the want of human character and 
passion in the personages that carry on the story, such as it is — 
are no defects in the Fairy Queen. On the contrary, the poetry 
is only left thereby so much the purer. Without calling Spenser 
the greatest of all poets, we may still say that his poetry is the 
most poetical of all poetry. Other poets are all of them some- 
thing else as well as poets, and deal in reflection, or reasoning, 
or humour, or wit, almost as largely as in the proper product of 
the imaginatiA'e faculty ; his strains alone, in the Fairy Queen, 
are poetry, all poetry, and nothing but poetry. It is vision 
unrolled after vision, to the sound of endlessly varying music. 
The " shaping spirit of imagination," considered apart from moral 
sensibility — from intensity of passion on the one hand, and 
grandeur of conception on the other — certainly never was pos- 
sessed in the like degree by any other writer ; nor has any other 
evinced a deeper feeling of all forms of the beautiful; nor have 
words ever been made by any other to embody thought with 
more wonderful art. On the one hand invention and fancy in 
the creation or conception of his thoughts ; on the other the most 
exquisite sense of beauty, united with a command over all the 
resources of language, in their vivid and musical expression — 
these are the great distinguishing characteristics of Spenser's 
poetry. What of passion is in it lies mostly in the melody of 
the verse ; but that is often thrilling and subduing in the highest 
degree. Its moral tone, also, is very captivating: a soul of 



SPENSER. 233 

nobleness, gentle and tender as the spirit of its own chivalry, 
modulates every cadence. 

Spenser's extraordinary faculty of vision- seeing and picture- 
drawing can fail to strike none of his readers ; but he will not 
be adequately appreciated or enjoyed by those who regard verse 
either as a non-essential or as a very subordinate element of 
poetry. Such minds, however, must miss half the charm of all 
poetry. Not only all that is purely sensuous in poetry must 
escape them, but likewise all the pleasurable excitement that 
lies in the harmonious accordance of the musical expression with 
the informing idea or feeling, and in the additional force or 
brilliancy that in such inter-union is communicated by the one 
to the other. All beauty is dependent upon form : other things 
may often enter into the beautiful, but this is the one thing that 
can never be dispensed with; all other ingredients, as they must 
be contained by, so must be controlled by this ; and the only 
thing that standing alone may constitute the beautiful is form or 
outline. Accordingly, whatever addresses itself to or is suited 
to gratify the imagination takes this character : it falls into more 
or less of regiilarity and measure. Mere passion is of all things 
the most unmeasured and irregular, naturally the most opposed 
of all things to form. But in that stat-e it is also wholly unfitted 
for the purposes of art ; before it can become imaginative in any 
artistic sense it mast have put oif its original merely volcanic 
character, and worn itself into something of measure and music. 
Thus all impassioned composition is essentially melodious, in a 
higher or lower degree ; measured language is the appropriate 
and natural expression of passion or deep feeling operating artis- 
tically in writing or speech. The highest and most perfect kind 
of measured language is verse ; and passion expressing itself in 
verse is what is properly called poetry. Take away the verse, 
and in most cases you take away half the poetry, sometimes 
much more. The verse, in truth, is only one of several things 
by the aid of which the passion seeks to give itself effecitive 
expression, or by which the thought is endowed with additional 
animation or beauty ; nay, it is only one ingredient of the musical 
expression of the thought or passion. If the verse may be 
dispensed with, so likewise upon the same principle may every 
decoration of the sentiment or statement, everything else that 
would do more than convey the bare fact. Let the experiment 
be tried, and see how it will answer. Take a single instance. 
" Immediately through the obscurity a great number of flags 
were seen to be raised, all richly coloured :" out of these words, 
no doubt, the reader or hearer might, after some meditation, 



234 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

extract tlie conception of a very imposing scene. But, although 
they intimate with sufficient exactness and distinctness the same 
literal fact, they are nevertheless the deadest prose compared 
with Milton's glorious words : — 

" All in a moment through the gloom were seen 
Ten thousand banners rise into the air, 
With orient colom-s waving." 

And so it would happen in every other case in which true 
poetry was divested of its musical expression : a part, and it 
might be the greater part, of its life, beauty, and effect, would 
always be lost ; and it would, in truth, cease to be what is dis- 
tinctively called poetry or song, of which verse is as much one 
of the necessary constituents as passion or imagination itself. 
Those who dispute this will never be able to prove more than 
that their own enjoyment of the sensuous part of poetry, which 
is really that in which its peculiar character resides, is limited 
or feeble ; which it may very well be in minds otherwise highly 
gifted, and even endowed with considerable imaginative power. 
The feeling of the merely beautiful, however, or of beauty unim- 
pregnated by something of a moral spirit or meaning, is not 
likely in such minds to be very deep or strong. High art, 
therefore, is not their proper region, in any of its departments. 
In poetry thej will probably not very greatly admire or enjoy 
either Spenser or Milton — and perhaps would prefer Paradise 
Lost in the prose version which Osborne the bookseller in the 
last century got a gentleman of Oxford to execute for the 
use of readers to whom -the sense was rather obscured by the 
verse. 

Passing over several of the great passages towards the com- 
mencement of the poem — such as the description of Queen 
Lucifera and her Six Counsellors in the Fourth Canto of the First 
Book, that of the visit of the Witch Duessa to Hell in the Fifth, 
and that of the Cave of Despair in the Ninth — which are pro- 
bably more familiarly known to the generality of readers, we 
will take as a specimen of the Fairy Queen the escape of the 
Enchanter Archimage from Bragadoccio and his man Trompart, 
and the introduction and description of Belphoebe, in the Third 
Canto of Book Second : — 

He stayed not for more bidding, but away 
Was sudden vanished out of his sight : 
The northern wind his wings did broad display 
At his command, and reared him up light, 
From off the earth to take his airy flight. 



SPENSER. 235 

They looked about, but nowhere could espy 
Tract of his foot ; then dead through great affright 
They both nigh were, and each bade other fly ; 
Both fled at once, ne ever back returned eye ; 

Till that they come unto a forest green, 

In which they shrowd themselves from causeless fear ; 

Yet fear them foUows still, whereso they been ; 

Each trembling leaf and whistling wind they hear 

As ghastly bug does greatly them afear ; 

Yet both do strive their tearfulness to feign.^ 

At last they heard a horn, that shrilled clear 

Throughout the wood, that echoed again. 

And made the forest ling, as it would rive in twain. 

Eft^ through the thick they heard one rudely rush, 

With noise whereof he from his lofty steed 

Down fell to ground, and crept into a bush, 

To hide his coward head from dying dreed ; 

But Trompart stoutly stayed, to taken heed 

Of what might hap. Eftsoon there stepped foorth 

A goodly lady clad in hunter's weed, 

That seemed to be a woman of great worth, 

And by her stately portance"* born of heavenly birth. 

Her face so fair as flesh it seemed not, 

But heavenly pourtrait of bright angels' hue, 

Clear as the sky, withouten blame or blot. 

Through goodly mixture of complexions due ; 

And in her cheeks the vermeil red did shew 

Like roses in a bed of lillies shed, 

The which ambrosial odours from them threw, 

And gazers' sense with double pleasure fed. 

Able to heal the sick, and to revive the dead. 

In her fair eyes two living lamps did flame, 

Ejndled above at the heavenly Maker's light. 

And darted fiery beams out of the same, 

So passing persant and so wondi'ous bright 

That quite bereaved the rash beholder's sight : 

In them the blinded god his lustful fire 

To kindle oft assayed, but had no might ; 

For with dread majesty and awful ire 

She broke his wanton darts, and quenched base desire. 

Her ivory forehead, full of bounty brave, 
Like a broad table did itself dispread 
For Love his lofty triumphs to engrave, 
And write the battles of his great godhead : 



1 Bugbear. ^ Conceal. ^ Soon. ■* Carriage. 



236 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

All good and honour might therein be read, 

For there their dwelling was ; and, when she spake, 

Sweet words like dropping honey she did shed, 

And twixt the pearls and rubins^ softly brake 

A silver sound, that heavenly music seemed to make. 

Upon her eyelids many graces sate, 

Under the shadow of her even brows, 

Working belgardes^ and amorous retrate ;2 

And every one her with a grace endows. 

And every one with meekness to her bows : 

So glorious mirror of celestial grace, 

And sovereign moniment of mortal vows, 

How shall frail pen descrive^ her heavenly face, 

For fear through want of skill her beauty to disgrace ? 

So fair, and thousand thousand times more fair, 
She seemed, when she presented was to sight ; 
And was yclad, for heat of scorching air, 
All in a silken camus^ lilly white, 
Purfled^ upon with many a folded plight,^ 
"Which all above besprinkled was throughout 
With golden aigulets, that glistened bright. 
Like twinkling stars ; and all the skirt about 
Was hemmed with golden fringe. 

Below her ham her weed^ did somewhat train f 

And her straight legs most bravely were embailed^*' 

In gilden^^ buskins of costly cord wain, ^ 

All barred with golden bends, which were entailed^' 

With curious anticks,^"* and full fair aumailed ;^ 

Before they fastened were under her knee 

In a rich jewel, and therein entrailed^^ 

The ends of all the knots, that none might see 

How they within their foldings close enwrapped be. 

Like two fair marble pillars they were seen, 

Which do the temj)le of the gods support. 

Whom all the people deck with girlonds^^ green. 

And honour in their festival resort ; 

Those same with stately grace and princely port 

She taught to tread, when she herself would grace ; 

But with the woody nymphs when she did sport, 

Or when the flying libbard^^ she did chase. 

She could them nimbly move, and after fly apace. 



^ Eubies. ' Beautiful looks. ^ Aspect. ^ Describe. 

^ Thin gown. ^ Gathered. '' Plait. ^ Dress. 

« Hang. 10 Enclosed. ^^ Gilded. i^ Spanish leather. 

13 Engraved, marked. i"* Figures. ^^ Enamelled, 

1^ Interwoven. i7 Garlands. ^^ Leopard, 



SPENSER. 237 

And in her hand a sharp boar-spear she held, 

And at her back a bow and quiver gay 

Stuffed with steel-headed darts, wherewith she quelled 

The salvage beasts in her victorious play, 

Knit with a golden baldric, which forelay 

Athwart her snowy breast, and did divide 

Her dainty paps ; which, like young fruit in May, 

Now little, gan to swell, and, being tied. 

Through her thin weed their places only signified. 

Her yellow locks, crisped like golden wire, 

About her shoulders weren loosely shed. 

And, when the wind amongst them did inspire, 

They waved like a penon wide dispread, 

And low behind her back were scattered ; 

And, whether art it were or heedless hap, 

As through the flowering forest rash she fled, 

In her rude hairs sweet flowers themselves did lap, 

And flourishing fresh leaves and blossoms did enwrap. 

Such as Diana, by the sandy shore 

Of swift Eurotas, or on Cynthus green. 

Where all the nymphs have her unwares forlore,^ 

Wandereth alone, with bow and arrows keen, 

To seek her game ; or as that famous queen 

Of Amazons, whom Pyrrhus did destroy. 

The day that first of Priam she was seen 

Did show herself in great triumphant joy, 

To succour the weak state of sad afBicted Troy. 



Other Elizabethan Poetry. 



In the six or seven years from 1590 to 1596, what a world of 
wealth had thus been added to our poetry by Spenser alone ! 
what a different thing from what it was before had the English 
language been made by his writings to natives, to foreigners, to 
all posterity ! But England was now a land of song, and the 
busiest and most productive age of our poetical literature had 
fairly commenced. What are commonly called the minor poets 
of the Elizabethan age are to be counted by hundreds, and few 
of them are altogether without merit. If they have nothing 
else, the least gifted of them have at least something of the fresh- 
ness and airiness of that balmy morn, some tones caught from 
their greater contemporaries, some echoes of the spirit of music 
that then Allied 'the universal air. For the most part the minor 

* Forsaken. 



238 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Elizabetlian poetry is remarkable for ingenuity and elaboration, 
often carried to the length of quaintness, both in the thought 
and the expression ; but, if there be more in it of art than of 
nature, the art is still that of a high school, and always consists 
in something more than the mere disguising of prose in the dress 
of poetry. If it is sometimes unnatural, it is at least very seldom 
simply insipid, like much of the well-soimding verse of more 
recent eras. The writers are always in earnest, whether with 
their nature or their art ; they never write from no impulse, and 
with no object except that of stringing commonplaces into rhyme 
or rhythm ; even when it is most absurd, what they produce is 
still fanciful, or at the least fantastical. The breath of some 
sort of life or other is almost always in it. The poorest of it is 
distinguished from prose by something more than the mere 
sound. 



Warner. 

The three authors of the poems of most pretension, with the 
exception of the Fairy Queen, that appeared during the period 
now under review, are Warner, Drayton, and Daniel. William 
Warner is supposed to have been born about the year 1558 ; he 
died in 1609. He has told us himself (in his Eleventh Book, 
chapter 62), that his birthplace was London, and that his father 
was one of those who sailed with Chancellor to Muscovy, in 
1555: this, he says, was before he himself was born. Warner's 
own profession was the not particularly poetical one of an attor- 
ney of the Common Pleas. According to Anthony Wood, who 
makes him to have been a Warwickshire man, he had before 
1586 written several pieces of verse, "whereby his name was 
cried up among the minor poets ;" but this is probably a mistake ; 
none of this early poetry imputed to Warner is now known to 
exist ; and in the Preface to his Albion's England, he seems to 
intimate that that was his first performance in verse. In the Dedi- 
cation to his poem he explains the meaning of the title, which is 
not very obvious : " This our whole island," he observes, " an- 
ciently called Britain, but more anciently Albion, presently 
containing two kingdoms, England and Scotland, is cause (right 
honourable) that, to distinguish the former, whose only occur- 
rents [occurrences] I abridge from our history, I entitle this my 
book Albion's England." Albion's England first appeared, in 
thirteen Books, in 1586: and was reprinted in 1589, in 1592, 
in 1596, in 1597, and in 1602. In 1606 the author added a 



WARNER. 239 

Continnaiice, or continuation, in three Books ; and the whole 
work was republished (without, however, the last three Books 
having been actually reprinted) in 1612. In this last edition 
it is described on the title-page as " now revised, and newly 
enlarged [by the author] a little before his death." It thus 
appears that, so long as its popularity lasted, Albion's England 
was one of the most popular long poems ever written. But that 
was only for about twenty years : although the early portion of 
it had in less than that time gone through half a dozen editions, 
the Continuation, published in 1606, sold so indifferently that 
enough of the impression still remained to complete the book 
when the whole was republished in 1612, and after that no other 
edition was ever called for, till the poem was reprinted in 
Chalmers's collection in 1810. The entire neglect into which 
it so soon fell, from the height of celebrity and popular favour, 
was probabl}^ brought about by various causes. Warner, ac- 
cording to Anthony Wood, was ranked by his contemporaries 
on a level with Spenser, and they were called the Homer and 
Virgil of their age. If he and Spenser were ever equally 
admired, it must have been by very different classes of readers. 
Albion's England is undoubtedly a work of very remarkable 
talent of its kind. It is inform a history of England, or Southern 
Britain, from the Deluge to the reign of James I., but may fairly 
be said to be, as the title-page of the last edition describes it, 
" not barren in variety of inventive intermixtures." Or, to use 
the author's own words in his Preface, he certainly, as he hopes, 
has no great occasion to fear that he has grossly failed " in verity, 
brevity, invention, and variety, profitable, pathetical, pithy, and 
pleasant." In fact, it is one of the liveliest and most amusing 
poems ever vn-itten. Every striking event or legend that the 
old chronicles afford is seized hold of, and related always clearly, 
often with very considerable spirit and animation. But it is far 
from being a mere compilation ; several of the narratives are not 
to be found anywhere else, and a large proportion of the matter 
is Warner's own, in every sense of the word. In this, as vvell 
as in other respects, it has greatly the advantage over the Mirror 
for Magistrates, as a rival to which work it was perhaps origi- 
nally produced, and with the popularity of which it could 
scarcely fail considerably to interfere. Though a long poem 
(not much under 10,000 verses), it is still a much less ponderous 
work than the Mirror, absolutely as well as specifically. Its 
variety, though not obtained by any very artificial method, is 
infinite : not only are the stories it selects, unlike those in the 
Mirror, generally of a merry cast, and much more briefly and 



240 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

smartly told, but the reader is never kept long even on the same 
track or ground : all subjects, all dej)artments of human know- 
ledge or speculation, from theology down to common arithmetic, 
are intermixed, or rather interlaced, with the histories and 
legends in the most extraordinary manner. The verse is the 
favourite fourteen-syllable line of that age, the same in reality 
Avith that which has in modern times been commonly divided 
into two lines, the first of eight, the second of six syllables, and 
which in that form is still most generally used for short compo- 
sitions in verse, more especially for those of a narrative or other- 
wise popular character. What Warner was chiefly admired for 
in his own day was his style. Meres in his Wit's Treasury 
mentions him as one of those by whom the English tongue in 
that age had been " mightily enriched, and gorgeously invested 
in rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments." And for 
fluency, combined with precision and economy of diction, 
Warner is probably unrivalled among the writers of English 
verse. We do not know whether his professional studies and 
habits may have contributed to give this character to his style ; 
but, if the poetry of attorneys be apt to take this curt, direct, 
lucid, and at the same time flowing shape, it is a pity that we 
had not a little more of it. His command of the vulgar tongue, 
in particular, is wonderful. This indeed is perhaps his most 
remarkable poetical characteristic; and the tone which was 
thus given to his poem (being no doubt that of his own mind) 
may be conjectured to have been in great part the source both of 
its immense popularity for a time, and of the neglect and oblivion 
into which it was afterwards allowed to drop. Nevertheless, 
the poem, as we have said, has Yery remarkable merit in some 
respects, and many passages, or rather portions of passages, in it 
may still be read with pleasure. It is also in the highest degree 
curious both as a repository of our old language, and for many 
notices of the manners and customs of our ancestors which are 
scattered up and down in it. All that is commonly known of 
Warner is from the story of xirgentile and Curan, which has 
been reprinted from his Fourth Book by Mrs. Cooper in The 
Muses' Library (1738), and by Percy in his Keliques, and that 
of The Patient Countess, which Percy has also given from his 
Eighth Book. 

The following passage from the Third Book, being the con- 
clusion of the 17th Chapter, is a specimen of Warner's very 
neatest style of narration. — He has related Ceesar's victory over 
the Britons, which he says was won with difficulty, the conquest 
of the country having been only accomplished through the 



WARNER. 241 

submission of tliat " traitorous kniglit, the Earl of London," 
whose disloyal example in yielding his charge and city to the foe 
was followed by the other cities ; and then he winds up thus : — 

But he, that won in every war, at Rome in civil robe 
Was stabbed to death : no certainty is underneath this globe ; 
The good are envied of the bad, and glory finds disdain, 
And people are in constancy as April is in rain ; 
Whereof, amidst our serious pen, this fable entertain : — 

An Ass, an Old Man, and a Boy did through the city pass ; 
And, whilst the wanton Boy did ride, the^ Old Man led the Ass. 
See yonder doting fool, said folk, that crawleth scarce for age, 
Doth set the boy upon his ass, and makes himself his page. 
Anon the blamed Boy alights, and lets the Old Man ride. 
And, as the Old Man did before, the Boy the Ass did guide. 
But, passing so, the people then did much the Old Man blame, 
And told him. Churl, thy limbs be tough ; let ride the boy, for shame. 
The fault thus found, both Man and Boy did back the ass and ride ; 
Then that the ass was over-charged each man that met them cried. 
Now both alight and go on foot, and lead the empty beast ; 
But then the people laugh, and say that one might ride at least. 
The Old Man, seeing by no ways he could the people please. 
Not blameless then, did drive the ass and drown him in the seas. 
Thus, whilst we be, it will not be that any pleaseth all ; 
Else had been wanting, worthily, the noble Caesar's fall. 

The end of Richard the Third, in the Sixth Book (Chapter 
26th), is given with much spirit : — 

Now Eichard heard that Richmond was assisted, and on shore, 

And like unkenneled Cerberus the crooked tyrant swore. 

And all complexions act at once confusedly in him ; 

He studieth, striketh, threats, entreats, and looketh mildly grim ; 

Mistrustfully he trusteth, and he dreadingly doth ^ dare, 

And forty passions in a trice in him consort and square. 

But when, by his convented force, his foes increased more, 

He hastened battle, finding his corrival apt therefore. 

When Richmond orderly in all had battailed his aid, 
Enringed by his complices, their cheerful leader said : — 
Now is .the time and place, sweet friends, and we the persons be 
That must give England breath, or else unbreathe for her must we. 
No tyranny is fabled, and no tyrant was indeed. 
Worse than our foe, whose works will act my words if well he speed. 
For ills ^ to ills superlative are easily enticed. 
But entertaia amendment as the Gergesites did Christ. 






1 In the printed copy " a." The edition before us, that of 1612, abounds 
with typographical errata. 

2 There can be no question that this is the true word, which is misprinted 
*' did " in the edition before us. ^ Misprinted " ill." 

R 



242 ENGLISH LITERATURE- AND LANGUAGE. 

Be valiant then ; he biddeth so that would not be outbid 
For courage, yet shall honour him, though base, that better did. 
I am right heir Lancastrian, he in York's destroyed right 
Usurpeth ; but, through either source,^ for neither claim I fight, 
But for our country's long-lacked weal, for England's peace, I war ; 
Wherein He speed us, unto whom I all events refar. 

Meanwhile had furious Richard set his armies in array. 
And then, with looks even like himself, this or the like did say : — 
Why, lads ? shall yonder Welshman, with his stragglers, overmatch ? 
Disdain ye not such rivals, and defer ye their dispatch ? 
Shall Tudor from Plantagenet the crown by craking snatch ? 
Know Richard's very thoughts (he touched the diadem he wore) 
Be metal of this metal : then believe I love it more 
Than that for other law than life to supersede my claim ; 
And lesser must not be his plea that counterpleads the same. 

The weapons overtook his words, and blows they bravely change, 
When like a lion, thirsting blood, did moody Richard range. 
And made large slaughters where he went, till Richmond he espied. 
Whom singling, after doubtful swords, the valorous tyrant died. 

There are occasionally touclies of true pathos in Warner, and 
one great merit which he has is, that his love of brevity gene- 
rally prevents him from spoiling any stroke of this kind by mul- 
tiplying words and images with the view of heightening the 
effect, as. many of his contemporaries are prone to do. His 
picture of Fair Eosamond in the hands of Queen Eleanor is very 
touching : — 

Fair Rosamund, surprised thus ere thus she did expect, 
Fell on her humble knees, and did her fearful hands erect : 
She blushed out beauty, whilst the tears did wash her pleasing face. 
And begged pardon, meriting no less of common grace. 
So far, forsooth, as in me lay, I did, quoth she, withstand ; 
But what may not so great a king by means or force command ? 
And dar'st thou, minion, quoth the Queen, thus article to me ? 

With that she dashed her on the lips, so dyed double red : 

Hard was the heart that gave the blow ; soft were those lips that bled. 

Then forced she her to swallow down, prepared for that intent, 

A poisoned potion 



Daniel. 

The great work of Samuel Daniel, who was bom at Taunton, 
in Somersetshire, in 1562, and died in 1619, is his Civil Wars 
between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, in eight Books, 

^ This is the only reading like sense we can make out of " through cithers 
oui-s," wMch is the nonsense of the edition before us. 



1 



DANIEL. 243 

the first four published in 1595, the fifth in 1599, the sixth in 
1602, the two last in 1609 ; the preceding Books being always, 
we believe, republished along with the new edition. He is also 
the author of various minor poetical productions, of which the 
principal are a collection of fifty-seven Sonnets entitled Delia 
his Musophilus, containing a General Defence of Learning, some 
short epistles, and several tragedies and court masques. And he 
wrote, besides, in prose, a History of England, from the Conquest 
to the end of the reign of Edward III., as well as a Defence of 
Ehj^me. Very opposite judgments have been passed upon Daniel. 
Ben Jonson, in his conversations with Drummond, declared him 
to be no poet : Drummond, on the contrary, pronounces him 
" for sweetness of rhyming second to none." His style, both in 
prose and verse, has a remarkably modern air : if it were weeded 
of a few obsolete expressions, it would scarcely seem more 
antique than that of Waller, which is the most modern of the 
seventeenth century. Bishop Kennet, who has republished 
Daniel's History, after telling us that the author had a place at 
Court in the reign of King James I., being groom of the privy 
chambers to the Queen, observes, that he " seems to have taken 
all the refinement a court could give him ;" and probably the 
absence of pedantry in his style, and its easy and natural flow, 
are to be traced in great part to the circumstance of his having 
been a man of the world. His verse, too, always careful and 
exact, is in many passages more than smooth ; even in his dra- 
matic writings (which, having nothing dramatic about them 
except the form, have been held in very small estimation) it is 
frequently musical and sweet, though always artificial. The 
highest quality of his poetry is a tone of quiet, pensive reflection 
in which he is fond of indulging, and which often rises to dignity 
and eloquence, and has at times even something of depth and 
originality. Daniel's was the not uncommon fate of an attendant 
upon courts and the great : he is believed to have experienced 
some neglect from his royal patrons in his latter days, or at least 
to have been made jealous by Ben Jonson being employed to 
furnish part of the poetry for the court entertainments, the supply 
of which he used to have all to himself; upon which he retired 
to a life of quiet and contemplation in the country. It sounds 
strange in the present day to be told that his favourite retreat 
from the gaiety and bustle of London was a house which he 
rented in Old Street, St. Luke's. In his gardens here, we are 
informed by the writer of the Life prefixed to his collected poems, 
he would often indulge in entire solitude for many months, or at 
most receive the visits of only a few select friends. It is said to 



244 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

have been here that he composed most of his dramatic pieces. 
Towards the end of his life he retired to a farm which he had at 
Beckington, near Philip's Norton, in Somersetshire, and his 
death took place there. " He was married," says the editor of 
his works, "but whether to the person he so often celebrates 
under the name of Delia, is uncertain." Fuller, in his Worthies, 
tells us that his wife's name was Justina. They had no children. 
Daniel is said to have been appointed to the honorary post of 
Poet Laureate after the death of S]3enser. 

In his narrative poetry, Daniel is in general wire-drawn, flat, 
and feeble. He has no passion, and very little descriptive power. 
His Civil Wars has certainly as little of martial animation in it 
as any poem in the language. There is abundance, indeed, of 
" the tranquil mind ;" but of " the plumed troops," and the rest 
of " the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war," Daniel 
seems, in composing this work (we had nearly written in this 
composing work) to have taken as complete a farewell as Othello 
himself. It is mostly a tissue of long-winded disquisition and 
cold and languid declamation, and has altogether more of the 
qualities of a good opiate than of a good poem. We will there- 
fore take the few extracts for which we can make room from 
some of his other productions, where his vein of reflection is more 
in place, and also better in itself. His Musophilus is perhaps 
upon the whole his finest piece. The poem, which is in the form 
of a dialogue between Philocosmus (a lover of the world) and 
Musophilus (a lover of the Muse), commences thus: — 

Philocosmus, 

Fond man, Musophilus, that thus dost spend 
In an iingai])ful art thy dearest days, 
Tiring thy wits, and toiling to no end 
But to attain that idle smoke of praise ! 
Now, when this busy world cannot attend 
The untimely music of neglected lays. 
Other delights than these, other desires. 
This wiser profit-seeking age requires. 

Musophilus. 

Friend Philocosmus, I confess indeed 

I love this sacred art thou set'st so light : 

And, though it never stand my life in stead, 

It is enough it gives myself delight. 

The whilst my unafflicted mind doth feed 

On no unholy thoughts for benefit. 

Be it that my unseasonable song 

Come out of time, that fault is in the time ; 



DANIEL. 245 

And I must not do virtue so mucli wrong 
As love her aught the worse for others' crime ; 
And yet I find some blessed spirits among 
That cherish me, and like and grace my rhyme. 

A gain that ^ I do more in soul esteem 

Than all the gain of dust the world doth crave ; 

And, if I may attain but to redeem 

My name from dissolution and the grave, 

I shall have done enough ; and better deem 

To have lived to be than to have died to have. 

Short-breathed mortality would yet extend 
That span of life so far forth as it may, 
And rob her fate ; seek to beguile her end 
Of some few lingering days of after-stay ; 
That all this Little All might not descend 
Into the dark an universal prey ; 
And give our labours yet this poor delight 
That, when our days do end, they are not done, 
And, though we die, we shall not perish quite, 
But live two lives where others have but one. 

Afterwards Musophilus replies very finely to an objection of 
Philocosmus to the cultivation of poetry, from the small number 
of those who really cared for it : — 

And for the few that only lend their ear, 
That few is all the world ; which with a few 
Do ever live, and move, and work, and stir. 
This is the heart doth feel, and only know ; 
The rest, of all that only bodies bear. 
Roll up and down, and fill up but the row ; 

And serve as others' members, not their own. 
The instruments of those that do direct. 
Then, what disgrace is this, not to be known 
To those know not to give themselves respect ? 
And, though they swell, with pomp of folly blown. 
They live ungraced, and die but in neglect. 

And, for my part, if only one allow 
The care my labouring spirits take in this. 
He is to me a theatre large enow. 
And his applause only sufficient is ; 
All my respect is bent but to his brow ; 
That is my all, and all I am is his. 



• Erroneously printed in the edition before us (2 vols. 12mo. 1718) "Again 
that." 



246 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

And, if some worthy spirits be pleased too, 
It siiall more comfort breed, but not more wilL 
But what if none ? It cannot yet undo 
The love I bear unto this holy skiU. : 
This is the thing that I was born to do ; 
This is my scene ; this part must I fulfil. 

It is in another poem, his Epistle to the Lady Margaret 
Countess of Cumberland (mother of Lady Anne Clifford, after- 
wards Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery, to whom 
Daniel had been tutor), that we have the stanza ending with the 
striking exclamation — 

Unless above himself he can 

Erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! 



Deayton. 

Michael Drayton, who is computed to have been bom in 1563, 
and who died in 1631, is one of the most voluminous of our old 
poets ; being the author, besides many minor compositions, of 
three works of great length : — his Barons' Wars (on the subject 
of the civil wars of the reign of Edward II.), originally entitled 
Mortimeriados, under which name it was published in 1596 ; his 
England's Heroical Epistles, 1598 ; and his Polyolbion, the first 
eighteen Books of which appeared in 1612, and the whole, con- 
sisting of thirty Books, and extending to as many thousand lines, 
in 1622. This last is the work on which his fame principally 
rests. It is a most elaborate and minute topographical descrip- 
tion of England, written in Alexandrine rhymes ; and is a very 
remarkable work for the varied learning it displays, as well as 
for its poetic merits. The genius of Drayton is neither very ima- 
ginative nor very pathetic ; but he is an agreeable and weighty 
writer, with an ardent, if not a highly creative, fancy. From 
the height to which he occasionally ascends, as well as from his 
power of keeping longer on the wing, he must be ranked, as he 
always has been, much before both Warner and Daniel. He has 
greatly more elevation than the former, and more true poetic life 
than the latter. The following is from the commencement of 
the Thirteenth Book, or Song, of the Polyolbion, the subject of 
which is the County of Warwick, of which Drayton, as he here 
tells us, was a native : — 

Upon the mid-lands now the industrious muse doth fall ; 
That shire which we the heart of England well may call, 



DRAYTON. 24'3 

As she herself extends (the midst which is decreed) 
Betwixt St. Michael's Mount and Berwick bordering Tweed, 
Brave Warwick, that abroad so long advanced her Bear, 
By her illustrious Earls renowned every where ; 
Above her neighbouring shires which always bore her head. 
My native country, then, which so brave spirits hast bred, 
If there be virtues yet remaining in thy earth, 
Or any good of thine thou bred'st into my birth, 
Accept it as thine own, whilst now 1 sing of thee, 
Of all thy later brood the unworthiest though I be. 

When Phoebus lifts his head out of the water's ^ wave, 

No sooner doth the earth her flowery bosom brave. 

At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring 

But Hunt's up to the morn the feathered sylvans sing ; 

And, in the lower grove as on the rising knowl. 

Upon the highest spray of every mounting pole 

These quiristers are perched, with many a speckled breast : 

Then from her burnished gate the goodly glittering East 

Gilds every mountain-top, which late the humorous night 

Bespangled had with pearl, to please the morning's sight ; 

On which the mirthful quires, with their clear open throats, 

Unto the joyful morn so strain their warbling notes 

That hills and valleys ring, and even the echoing air 

Seems all composed of sounds about them every where. 

The throstle with shrill sharps, as purposely he song 

To awake the lustless sun, or chiding that so long 

He was in coming forth that should the thickets thrill ; 

The woosel near at hand ; that hath a golden bill. 

As nature him had marked of purpose t' let us see 

That from all other birds his tunes should different be : 

For with their vocal sounds they sing to pleasant May ; 

Upon his dulcet pipe the merle doth only play. 

When in the lower brake the nightingale hard by 

In such lamenting strains the joyful hours doth ply 

As though the other birds she to her tunes would draw 

And, but that Nature, by her all-constraining law, 

Each bird to her own kind this season doth invite. 

They else, alone to hear that charmer of the night 

(The more to use their ears) their voices sure would spare. 

That moduleth her notes so admirably rare 

As man to set in parts at first had learned of her. 

To Philomel the next the linnet we prefer ; 

And by that warbling the bird woodlark place we then, 

The red-sparrow, the nope, the redbreast, and the wren ; 

The yellow-pate, which, though she hurt the blooming tree, 

Yet scarce hath any bird a finer pipe than she. 



* Or, perhaps, "watery." The common text gives " winter's." 



248 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

And, of these clianting fowls, tlie goldfincli not behind, 
That hath so many sorts descending from her kind. 
The tydy, for her notes as delicate as they ; 
The laughing hecco ; then, the counterfeiting jay. 
The softer with the shrill, some hid among the leaves. 
Some in the taller trees, some in the lower greaves, 
Thus sing away the morn, until the mounting sun 
Through thick exhaled fogs his golden head hath run, 
And through the twisted tops of our close covert creeps 
To kiss the gentle shade, this while that sweetly sleeps. 

We will add a short specimen of Drayton's lighter style from 
his Nymphidia — the account of the equipage of the Queen of 
the Fairies, when she set out to visit her lover Pigwiggen. The 
reader may compare it with Mercutio's description in Komeo and 
Juliet : — 

Her chariot ready straight is made : 
Each thing therein is fitting laid, 
That she by nothing might be stayed, 

For nought must be her letting ; 
Four nimble guests the horses were, 
Their harnesses of gossamer, 
Fly Cranion, her charioteer, 

Upon the coach-box getting. 

Her chariot of a snail's fine shell, 
Which for the colours did excel, 
The fair Queen Mab becoming well, 

So lively was the limning ; 
The seat the soft wool of the bee. 
The cover (gallantly to see) 
The wing of a pied butterflee ; 

I trow 'twas simple trimming. 

The wheels composed of cricket's bones. 
And daintily made for the nonce ; 
For fear of rattling on the stones 

With thistle down they shod it ; 
For all her maidens much did fear 
If Oberon had chanced to hear 
That Mab his queen should have been there, 

He would not have abode it. 

She mounts her chariot with a trice. 
Nor would she stay for no advice 
Until her maids, that were so nice. 

To wait on her were fitted ; 
But ran herself away alone ; 
Which when they heard, there was not one 
But hasted after to be gone, 

As she had been diswitted. 






JOSEPH HALL. 249 



Hop, and Mop, and Drab so clear, 
Pip and Trip, and Skip, that were 
To Mab their sovereign so dear, 

Her special maids of honour ; 
Fib, and Tib, and Pink, and Pin, 
Tick, and Quick, and Jill, and Jin, 
Tit, and Nit, and Wap, and Win, 

The train that wait upon her. 

Upon a grasshopper they got, 

And, what with amble and with trot, 

For hedge nor ditch they spared not, 

But after her they hie them : 
A cobweb over them they throw, 
To shield the wind if it should blow ; 
Themselves they wisely could bestow 

Lest any should espy them. 



Joseph Hall. 

Joseph Hall was bom in 1574, and was successively bishop 
of Exeter and Norwich, from the latter of which sees having 
been expelled by the Long Parliament, he died, after protracted 
sufferings from imprisonment and poverty, in 1656. Hall began 
his career of authorship by the publication of Three Books of 
Satires, in 1597, while he was a student at Cambridge, and only 
in his twenty-third year. A continuation followed the next 
year under the title of Virgidemiarum the Three last Books ; 
and the whole were afterwards republished together, as Virgi- 
demiarum Six Books; that is, six books of bundles of rods. 
*' These satires," says Warton, who has given an elaborate 
analysis of them, " are marked with a classical precision to which 
English poetry had yet early attained. They are replete with 
animation of style and sentiment. . . . The characters are 
delineated in strong and lively colouring, and their discrimina- 
tions are touched with the masterly traces of genuine humour. 
The versification is equally energetic and elegant, and the fabric 
of the couplets approaches to the modern standard."* Hall's 
Satires have been repeatedly reprinted in modern times. 



Sylvester. 

One of the most popular poets of this date was Joshua Syl- 
vester, the translator of The Divine Weeks and Works, and 

* Hist, of Eng. Poet. iv. 338. 



250 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

other productions, of the French poet Du Bartas. Sylvester has 
the honour of being supposed to have been one of the early 
favourites of Milton. In one of his publications he styles him- 
self a Merchant- Adventurer, and he seems to have belonged to 
the Puritan party, which may have had some share in influencing 
Milton's regard. His translation of Du Bartas vras first published 
in 1605 ; and the seventh edition (beyond which, we believe, its 
popularity did not carry it) appeared in 1641. Nothing can be 
more uninspired than the general run of Joshua's verse, or more 
fantastic and absurd than the greater number of its more ambi- 
tious passages ; for he had no taste or judgment, and, provided 
the stream of sound and the jingle of the rhyme were kept up, 
all was right in his notion. His poetry consists chiefly of transla- 
tions from the French ; but he is also the author of some original 
pieces, the title of one of which, a courtly offering from the 
poetical Puritan to the prejudices of King James, may be quoted 
as a lively specimen of his style and genius : — " Tobacco battered, 
and the pipes shattered, about their ears that idly idolize so base 
and barbarous a weed, or at leastwise overlove so loathsome a 
vanity, by a volley of holy shot thundered from Mount Helicon."* 
But, with all his general flatness and frequent absurdity, Syl- 
vester has an uncommon flow of harmonious words at times, and 
occasionally even some fine lines and felicitous expressions. His 
contemporaries called him the " Silver-tongued Sylvester," for 
what they considered the sweetness of his versification — and 
some of his best passages justify the title. Indeed, even when 
the substance of what he writes approaches nearest to nonsense, 
the sound is often very graceful, soothing the ear with something 
like the swing and ring of Dryden's heroics. The commence- 
ment of the following passage from his translation of Du Bartas 
may remind the reader of Milton's "Hail, holy light! offspring 
of heaven first-born ": — 

All hail, pure lamp, bright, sacred, and excelling ; 
Sorrow and care, darkness and dread repelling ; 
Thou world's great taper, wicked men's just terror, 
Mother of truth, true beauty's only mirror, 
God's eldest daughter ; ! how thou art full 
Of grace and goodness ! ! how beautiful ! 

But yet, because all pleasures wax unpleasant 
If without pause we still possess them present, 
And none can right discern the sweets of peace 
That have not felt war's irksome bitterness, 



* 8vo. Lend. 1615. 



CHAPMAN'S HOMER. 251 

And swans seem whiter if swart crows be by 

(For contraries each, other best descry), 

The All's architect alternately decreed 

That Night the Day, the Day should Night succeed. 

The Night, to temper Day's exceeding drought, 
Moistens our air, and makes our earth to sprout : 
The Night is she that all our travails eases, 
Buries our cares, and all our griefs appeases : 
The Night is she that, with her sable wing 
In gloomy darkness hushing every thing, 
Through all the world dumb silence doth distil, 
And wearied bones with quiet sleep doth fill. 

Sweet Night ! without thee, without thee, alas ! 
Our life were loathsome, even a hell, to pass ; 
For outward pains and inward passions still. 
With thousand deaths, would soul and body thriU. 
Night, thou puUest the proud masque away 
Wherewith vain actors, in this world's great play, 
By day disguise them. For no difference 
Night makes between the peasant and the prince, 
The poor and rich, the prisoner and the judge, 
The foul and fair, the master and the drudge, 
The fool and wise. Barbarian and the Greek ; 
For Night's black mantle covers all alike. 



Chapman's Homee. 



George Chapman was born at Hitching Hill, in the county 
of Hertford, in 1557, and lived till 1634. Besides his plays, 
which will be afterwards noticed, he is the author of several 
original poetical pieces ; but lie is best and most favourably 
knovm by his versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. " He 
would have made a great epic poet," Charles Lamb has said, 
in his Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, turning to 
these works after having characterized his dramas, " if, indeed, 
he has not abundantly shown himself to be one : for his Homer 
is not so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles 
and Ulysses re-written. The earnestness and passion which 
he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible 
to a reader of mere modem translations. His almost Greek zeal 
for the honour of his heroes is only paralleled by that fierce 
spirit of Hebrew bigotry with which Milton, as if personating 
one of the zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat 
down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. 
The great obstacle to Chapman's translations being read is their 



252 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

unconquerable quaintness. He pours out in the same breath the 
most just and natural, and the most violent and forced expres- 
sions. He seems to grasp whatever words come first to hand 
during the impetus of inspiration, as if all other must be inade- 
quate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all in all in 
poetry) is everywhere present, raising the low, dignifying the 
mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers 
glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be 
moved by words or in spite of them, be disgusted and overcome 
that disgust." Chapman's Homer is, in some respects, not un- 
worthy of this enthusiastic tribute. Few writers have been 
more copiously inspired with the genuine frenzy of poetry. 
With more judgment and more care he might have given to his 
native language, in his version of the Iliad, one of the very 
greatest of the poetical works it possesses. In spite, however, 
of a hurry and impetuosity which betray him into many mis- 
translations, and, on the whole, have the effect perhaps of 
giving a somewhat too tumultuous and stormy representation of 
the Homeric poetry, the English into which Chapman transfuses 
the meaning of the mighty ancient is often singularly and deli- 
cately beautiful. He is the author of nearly all the happiest of 
the compound epithets which Pope has adopted, and of many 
others equally musical and expressive. *' Far-shooting Phoebus," 
— "the ever-living gods," — " the many-headed hill," — " the ivory- 
wristed queen," — are a few of the felicitous combinations with 
which he has enriched his native tongue. Carelessly executed, 
indeed, as the work for the most part is, there is scarcely a page 
of it that is not irradiated by gleams of the truest poetic genius. 
Often in the midst of a long paragraph of the most chaotic versi- 
fication, the fatigued and distressed ear is surprised by a few 
lines, — or it may be sometimes only a single line, — " musical as 
is Apollo's lute," — and sweet and graceful enough to compensate 
for ten times as much ruggedness. 



Harington; Fairfax; Fanshawe. 

Of the translators of foreign poetry which belong to this 
period, three are very eminent. Sir John Harington's transla- 
tion of the Orlando Furioso first appeared in 1591, when the 
author was in his thirtieth year. It does not convey all the glow 
and poetry of Ariosto ; but it is, nevertheless, a performance of 
great ingenuity and talent. The translation of Tasso's great epic 
by Edward Fairfax was first published, under the title of Godfrey 



DRUMMOND. ' 253 

of Bulloigne, or the Eecoverie of Jerusalem, in 1600. This is a 
work of true genius, full of passages of great beauty ; and, 
although by no means a perfectly exact or servile version of the 
Italian original, is throughout executed with as much care as 
taste and spirit.* Sir Kichard Fanshawe is the author of versions 
of Camoens's Lusiad, of Guarini's Pastor Fido, of the Fourth 
Book of the ^neid, of the Odes of Horace, and of the Querer 
por Solo Querer (To love for love's sake) of the Spanish dra- 
matist Mendoza. Some passages from the last-mentioned work, 
which was published in 1649, may be found in Lamb's Speci- 
mens,! the ease and flowing gaiety of which never have been 
excelled even in original writing. The Pastor Fido is also 
rendered with much spirit and elegance. Fanshawe is, besides, 
the author of a Latin translation of Fletcher's Faithful Shep- 
herdess, and of some original poetry. His genius, however, was 
sprightly and elegant rather than lofty, and perhaps he does not 
succeed so well in translating poetry of a more serious style. 



Drummond. 

One of the most graceful poetical writers of the reign of 
James I. is William Drummond, of Hawthornden, near Edin- 
burgh ; and he is further deserving of notice as the first of his 
countrymen, at least of any eminence, who aspired to write in 
English. He has left us a quantity of prose as well as verse ; 
the former very much resembling the style of Sir Philip Sidney 
in his Arcadia, — the latter, in manner and spirit, formed more 
upon the model of Surrey, or rather upon that of Petrarch and 
the other Italian poets whom Surrey and many of his English 
successors imitated. No early English imitator of the Italian 
poetry, however, has excelled Drummond, either in the sustained 
melody of his verse, or its rich vein of thoughtful tenderness. 



Davies. 

A remarkable poem of this age, first published in 1599, is 
the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies, who was successively 
solicitor- and attorney-general in the reign of James, and had 
been appointed to the place of Chief Justice of the King's Bench, 
when he died, before he could enter upon its duties, in 1626. 

* Eeprinted in the Tenth and Fourteenth Volumes of Knight's Weekly 
Volume. t Vol. ii. pp. 242—253. 



254: ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Davies is also the author of a poem on dancing entitled Orchestra, 
and of some minor pieces, all distinguished by vivacity as well 
as precision of style ; but he is only now remembered for his 
philosophical poem, the earliest of the kind in the language. It 
is written in rhyme, in the common heroic ten-syllable verse, but 
disposed in quatrains. No other writer has managed this difficult 
stanza so successfully as Davies : it has the disadvantage of 
requiring the sense to be in general closed at certain regularly 
and quickly recurring turns, which yet are very ill adapted for 
an effective pause ; and even all the skill of Dryden has been 
unable to free it from a certain air of monotony and languor, — a 
circumstance of which that poet may be supposed to have been 
himself sensible, since he wholly abandoned it after one or two 
early attempts. Davies, however, has conquered its difficulties ; 
and, as has been observed, "perhaps no language can produce a 
poem, extending to so great a length, of more condensation of 
thought, or in which fewer langniid verses will be found."* In 
fact, it is by this condensation and sententious brevity, so 
carefully filed and elaborated, however, as to involve no sacri- 
fice of perspicuity or fullness of expression, that he has attained 
his end. Every quatrain is a pointed expression of a separate 
thought, like one of Eochefoucault's Maxims ; each thought being, 
by great skill and painstaking in the packing, made exactly to 
fit and to fill the same case. It may be doubted, however, 
whether Davies would not have produced a still better poem if 
he had chosen a measure which would have allowed him greater 
freedom and real variety ; unless, indeed, his poetical talent was 
of a sort that required the suggestive aid and guidance of such 
artificial restraints as he had to cope with in this, and what 
would have been a bondage to a more fiery and teeming imagi- 
nation was rather a support to his. 



Donne. 

The title of the Metaphysical School of poetry, which in one 
sense of the words might have been given to Davies and his 
imitators, has been conferred by Dryden upon another race of 
writers, whose founder was a contemporary of Davies, the 
famous Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. Donne, who died 
at the age of fifty-eight, in 1631, is said to have written most of 
his poetry before the end of the sixteenth century, but none of it 
was published till late in the reign of James. It consists of 

* Hallam, Lit, of Europe, ii. 227. 



DONNE. 255 

lyrical pieces (entitled Songs and Sonnets), epithalamions or 
marriage songs, funeral and other elegies, satires, epistles, and 
divine poems. On a superficial inspection, Donne's verses look 
like so many riddles. They seem to be written upon the 
principle of making the meaning as difficult to be found out as 
possible — of using all the resources of language, not to express 
thought, but to conceal it. Nothing is said in a direct, natural 
manner ; conceit follows conceit without intermission ; the most 
remote analogies, the most far-fetched images, the most un- 
expected turns, one after another, surprise and often puzzle the 
understanding ; while things of the most opposite kinds — the 
harsh and the harmonious, the graceful and the grotesque, the 
grave and the gay, the pious and the profane — meet and mingle 
in the strangest of dances. But, running through all this bewil- 
derment, a deeper insight detects not only a vein of the most 
exuberant wit, but often the sunniest and most delicate fanc}'', 
and the truest tenderness and depth of feeling. Donne, though 
in the latter part of his life he became a very serious and devout 
poet as well as man, began by writing amatory lyrics, the strain 
of which is anything rather than devout ; and in this kind of 
writing he seems to have formed his poetic style, which, for such 
compositions, would, to a mind like his, be the most natural 
and expressive of any. The species of lunacy which quickens 
and exalts the imagination of a lover, would, in one of so seeth- 
ing a brain as he was, strive to expend itself in all sorts of novel 
and wayward combinations, just as Shakespeare has made it do in 
his Eomeo and Juliet, whose rich intoxication of spirit he has by 
nothing else set so livingly before us, as by making them thus 
exhaust all the eccentricities of language in their struggle to 
give expression to that inexpressible passion which had taken 
captive the whole heart and being of both. Donne's later poetry, 
in addition to the same abundance and originality of thought, 
often i-unning into a wildness and extravagance not so excusable 
here as in his erotic verses, is famous for the singular movement 
of the versification, which has been usually described as the 
extreme degree of the rugged and tuneless. Pope has given us a 
translation of his four Satires into modern language, which he 
calls The Satires of Dr. Donne Versified. Their harshness, as 
contrasted with the music of his lyrics, has also been referred to 
as proving that the English language, at the time when Donne 
wrote, had not been brought to a sufficiently advanced state for 
the writing of heroic verse in perfection.* That this last notion 
is wholly unfounded, numerous examples sufficiently testify : 
* See article on Donne in Penny Cyclopaedia, vol. ix. p. 85. 



256 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

not to speak of tlie blank verse of the dramatists, the rhymed 
heroics of Shakespeare, of Fletcher, of Jonson, of Spenser, and 
of other writers contemporary with and of earlier date than 
Donne, are, for the most part, as perfectly smooth and regular as 
any that have since been written ; at all events, whatever 
irregularity may be detected in them, if they be tested by Pope's 
narrow gamut, is clearly not to be imputed to any immaturity in 
the language. These writers evidently preferred and cultivated, 
deliberately and on principle, a wider compass, and freer and 
more varied flow, of melody than Pope had a taste or an. ear for. 
Nor can it be questioned, we think, that the peculiar construction 
of Donne's verse in his satires and many of his other later poems 
was also adopted by choice and on system. His lines, though 
they will not suit the see-saw style of reading verse, — to which 
he probably intended that they should be invincibly impracti- 
cable, — are not without a deep and subtle music of their own, in 
which the cadences respond to the sentiment, when enunciated 
with a true feeling of all that they convey. They are not smooth 
or luscious verses, certainly; nor is it contended that the en- 
deavour to raise them to as vigorous and impressive a tone as 
possible, by depriving them of all over-sweetness or liquidity, 
has not been carried too far ; but we cannot doubt that whatever 
harshuess they have was designedly given to them, and was 
conceived to infuse into them an essential part of their relish. 
Here is one of Donne's Songs : — 

Sweetest love, I do not go 

For weariness of thee, 
Nor in hope the world can show 
A fitter love for me ; 

But, since that I 
Must die at last, 'tis best 
Thus to use mj^self in jest 
By feigned death to die. 

Yesternight the sun went hence, 

And yet is here to-day ; 

He hath no desire nor sense, 

Nor half so short a way ; 

Then fear not me, 
But helieve that I shall make 
Hastier journeys, since I take 
More wings and spurs than he. 

how feehle is man's power ! 

That, if good fortune fall, 
Cannot add another hour, 

Nor a lost hour recall : 



SHAKESPEARE. 257 

But come bad chance, 
And we join to it our strength, 
And we teach it art and length 

Itself o'er us to advance. 

When thou sigh'st thou sigh'st not wind, 

But sigh'st my soul away ; 
"When thou weep'st, unkindly kind, 
My life's blood doth decay. 

It cannot be 
That thou lov'st me as thou say'st, 
If in thine my life thou waste, 
Which art the life of me. 

Let not thy divining heart 

Forethink me any ill ; 
Destiny may take thy part 
And may thy fears fulfil ; 

But think that we 
Are but laid aside to sleep : 
They who one another keep 
Alive ne'er parted be. 

Somewhat fantastic as this may be thought, it is siirely, 
notwithstanding, full of feeling; and nothing can be more 
delicate than the execution. Nor is it possible that the writer 
of such verses can have wanted an ear for melody, however 
capriciously he may have sometimes experimented upon lan- 
guage, in the effort, as we conceive, to bring a deeper, more 
expressive music out of it than it would readily yield. 



Shakespeare's Minor Poems. 



In the long list of the minor names of the Elizabethan poetry 
appears the bright name of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare 
published his Venus and Adonis in 1593, and his Tarquin and 
Lucrece in 1594; his Passionate Pilgrim did not appear till 
1599; the Sonnets not till 1609. It is probable, however, that 
the first mentioned of these pieces, which, in his dedication of it 
to the Earl of Southampton, he calls the first heir of his invention, 
was written some years before its publication ; and, although 
the Tarquin and Lucrece may have been published immediately 
after it was composed, it, too, may be accounted an early pro- 
duction. But, although this minor poetry of Shakespeare sounds 
throughout like the utterance of that spirit of highest invention 
and sweetest song before it had found its proper theme, much is 
here also, immature as it may be, that is still all Shakespearian 

s 



258 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

— the vivid conception, the inexhaustible fertility and richness 
of thought and imagery, the glowing passion, the gentleness 
withal that is ever of the poetry as it was of the man, the 
enamoured sense of beauty, the living words, the ear-delighting 
and heart-enthralling music; nay, even the dramatic instinct 
itself, and the idea at least, if not always the realization, of that 
sentiment of all subordinating and consummating art of which 
his dramas are the most wonderful exemplification in literature. 



Shakespeare's Dramatic Wori^s. 

Shakespeare, born in 1564, is enumerated as one of the 
proprietors of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1589; is sneered at 
by Eobert Greene in 1 592, in terms which seem to imply that 
he had already acquired a considerable reputation as a dramatist 
and a writer in blank verse, though the satirist insinuates that 
he was enabled to make the show he did chiefl}^ by the plunder 
of his predecessors ;* and in 1598 is spoken of by a critic of the 
day as indisputably the greatest of English dramatists, both for 
tragedy and comedy, and as having already produced his Two 
Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, Love's Labours Lost, 
Love's Labours Won (generally supposed to be All's Well that 
Ends Well), I Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, 
Eichard II., Eichard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andro- 
nicus, and Eomeo and Juliet.j: There is no ground, however, 
for feeling assured, and, indeed, it is rather improbable, that we 
have here a complete catalogue of the plays written by Shake- 
speare up to this date ; nor is the authority of so evidently loose 
a statement, embodying, it is to be supposed, the mere report of 
the town, sufficient even to establish absolutely the authenticity 
of every one of the plays enumerated. It is very possible, for 

* " There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his 
tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast 
out a blank verse as the best of you ; and, being an absolute Johannes Fac- 
totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a country." — Greene's 
Groatsworth of Wit, 1592. 

t But the Eev. Joseph Hunter, in the Second Part of New Illustrations of 
the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, 8vo, Lend. 1844, and pre- 
viously in a Disquisition on the Tempest, separately published, has contended 
that it must be tJie Tempest ; and I have more recently stated some reasons 
for supposing that it may be the Taming of the Shrew (see The English of 
Shakespeare, 1857 ; Prolegomena, pp. 8, 9). 

X Palladis Tamia ; Wit's Treasury. Being the Second Part of Wit's Com- 
monwealth. By Francis Meres. 1598, p. 282. 



SHAKESPEARE. 259 

example, that Meres may be mistaken in assigning Titus Andro- 
niciis to Shakespeare; and, on the other hand, he may be the 
author of Pericles, and may have already written that play and 
some others, although Meres does not mention them. The only 
other direct or positive information we possess on this subject is, 
that a History called Titus Andronicus, presumed to be the play 
afterwards published as Shakespeare's, was entered for publica- 
tion at Stationers' Hall in 1593 ; that the Second Part of Henry 
VI. (if it is by Shakespeare), in its original form of The First 
Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York 
and Lancaster, was published in 1594; the Third Part of Henry 
VI. (if by Shakespeare) , "in its original form of The True Tragedy 
of Eichard Duke of York, in 1595 ; his Eichard II., Eichard ill., 
and Eomeo and Juliet, in 1597; Love's Labours Lost and the 
First Part of Henry IV. in 1598 (the latter, however, having 
been entered at Stationers' Hall the preceding year) ; "a 
corrected and augmented" edition of Eomeo and Juliet in 1599 ; 
Titus Andronicus (supposing it to be Shakespeare's), the Second 
Part of Henry IV., Henry V., in its original form, the Mid- 
summer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and the 
Merchant of Venice, in 1600 (the last having been entered at 
Stationers' Hall in 1598); the Merry Wives of Windsor, in its 
original form, in 1602 (but entered at Stationers' Hall the year 
before*) ; Hamlet in 1603 (entered likewise the year before) ; a 
second edition of Hamlet, " enlarged to almost as much again as 
it was, according to the true and perfect copy," in 1604; Lear 
in 1608, and Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles, in 1609 (each 
being entered the preceding year) ; Othello not till 1622, six 
years after the author's death ; and all the other plays, namely, 
the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Winter's Tale, the Comed}^ 
of Errors, King John, All's Well that Ends Well, As You Like 
It, King Henry VIII., Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, Macbeth, 
the Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, 
Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, the Tempest, Twelfth Night, the 
First Part of Henry VI. (if Shakespeare had anything to do with 
that playf), and also the perfect editions of Henry V., the Merry 
Wives of Windsor, and the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., 

* This first sketch of the Merry Wives of Windsor has been reprinted for 
the Shakespeare Society, under the care of Mr. Halliwell, 1842, 

t See upon this question Mr. Knight's Essay upon the Three Parts of King 
Henry VI., and King Eichard III., in the Seventh Volume of his Library 
Edition of Shakspere, pp. 1 — 119. And see also Mr, Halliwell's Introduc- 
tion to the reprint of The First Sketches of the Second and Third Pafts of 
King Henry the Sixth (the First Part of the Contention and the True Tra- 
gedy), edited by him for the Shakespeare Society, 1843. 



260 ENGLISH L'lTERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

not, so far as is known, till they appear, along with those 
formerly printed, in the first folio, in 1 623. 

Such then is the sum of the treasure that Shakespeare has left 
us ; but the revolution which his genius wrought upon our 
national drama is placed in the clearest light by comparing his 
earliest plays with the best which the language possessed before 
his time. He has made all his predecessors obsolete. While 
his Merchant of Venice, and his Midsummer Night's Dream, and 
his Eomeo and Juliet, and his King John, and his Eichard I]., 
and his Henry IV., and his Eichard III., all certainly produced, 
as we have seen, before the year 1598, are still the most univer- 
sally familiar compositions in our literature, no other dramatic 
work that had then been written is now popularly read, oi 
familiar to anybody except to a few professed investigators of the 
antiquities of our poetry. Where are now the best productions 
even of such writers as Greene, and Peele, and Marlow, and 
Decker, and Marston, and Webster, and Thomas Heywood, and 
Middleton ? They are to be found among our Select Collections 
of Old Plays, — publications intended rather for the mere preserv- 
ation of the pieces contained in them, than for their diffusion 
among a multitude of readers. Or, if the entire works of a few 
of these elder dramatists have recently been collected and 
republished, this has still been done only to meet the demand of 
a comparatively very small number of curious students, anxious 
to possess and examine for themselves whatever relics are still 
recoverable of the old world of our literature. Popularly known 
and read the works of these writers never again will be : there 
is no more prospect or probability of this than there is that the 
plays of Shakespeare will ever lose their popularity among his 
countrymen. In that sense, everlasting oblivion is their portion, 
as everlasting life is his. In one form only have they any chance 
of again attracting some measure of the general attention — namely, 
in the form of such partial and very limited exhibition as Lamb 
has given us an example of in his Specimens. And herein we 
see the first great difference between the plays of Shakespeare 
and those of his predecessors, and one of the most immediately 
conspicuous of the improvements which he introduced into 
dramatic writing. He did not create our regular drama, but he 
regenerated and wholly transformed it, as if by breathing into it 
a new soul. We possess no dramatic production anterior to his 
appearance that is at once a work of high genius and of anything 
like equably sustained power throughout. Very brilliant flights 
of poetry there are in many of the pieces of our earlier dramatists ; 
but the higher they soar in one scene, the lower they generally 



SHAKESPEARE. 261 

seem to think it expedient to sink in the next. Their great 
efforts are made only by fits and starts : for the most part it 
must he confessed that the best of them are either merely extra- 
vagant and absurd, or do nothing but trifle or doze away over 
their task with the expenditure of hardly any kind of faculty at 
all. This may have arisen in part from their own want of 
judgment or want of painstaking, in part from the demands of a 
very rude condition of the popular taste ; but the effect is to 
invest all that they have bequeathed to us with an air of bar- 
barism, and to tempt us to take their finest displays of successful 
daring for mere capricious inspirations, resembling the sudden 
impidses of fury by which the listless and indolent man of the 
woods will sometimes be roused for the instant from his habitual 
laziness and passiveness to an exhibition of superhuman strength 
and activity. From this savage or savage-looking state our 
drama was first redeemed by Shakespeare. Even Milton has 
spoken of his " wood-notes wild ;" and Thomson, more uncere- 
moniously, has baptized him " wild Shakespeare,"* — as if a sort 
of half insane irregularity of genius were the quality that chiefly 
distinguished him from other great writers. If he be a " wild " 
writer, it is in comparison with some dramatists and poets of 
succeeding times, who, it must be admitted, are sufficiently 
tame : compared with the dramatists of his own age and of the 
age immediately preceding, — with the general throng of the 
writers from among whom he emerged, and the coruscations of 
whose feebler and more desultory genius he has made pale, — he 
is distinguished from them by nothing which is more visible at 
the first glance than by the superior regularity and elaboration 
that mark his productions. Marlow, and Greene, and Kyd may 
be (;alled wild, and wayward, and careless ; but the epithets are 
inapplicable to Shakespeare, by whom, in truth, it was that the 
rudeness of our early drama was first refined, and a spirit of high 
art put into it, which gave it^ order and symmetry as well as 
elevation. It was the union of the most consummate judgment 
with the highest creative power that made Shakespeare the 
miracle that he was, — if, indeed, we ought not rather to saj;^ that 
such an endowment as his of the poetical faculty necessarily 
implied the clearest and truest discernment as well as the utmost 
productive energy, — even as the most intense heat must illuminate 
as well as warm. 

But, undoubtedly, his dramas are distinguished from those of 
his predecessors by much more than merely this superiority in 

* " Is not wild Shakespeare thine and Nature's boast ?" — Thomson's Summer. 



202 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

the general principles upon whicli they are constructed. Such 
rare passages of exquisite poetry, and scenes of sublimity or true 
passion, as sometimes brighten the dreary waste of their produc- 
tions, are equalled or excelled in almost every page of his; — 
"the highest heaven of invention," to which they ascend only 
in far distant flights, and where their strength of pinion never 
sustains them long, is the familiar home of his genius. Other 
qualities, again, which charm us in his plays are nearly unknown 
in theirs. He first informed our drama with true wit and 
humour. Of boisterous, uproarious, blackguard merriment and 
buffoonery there is no want in our earlier dramatitsts, nor of 
mere gibing and jeering and vulgar personal satire ; but of true 
airy wit there is little or none. In the comedies of Shakespeare 
the wit plays and dazzles like dancing light. This seems to have 
been the excellence, indeed, for which he was most admired by 
his contemporaries ; for quickness and felicity of repartee they 
placed him above all other play-writers. But his humour was 
still more his own than his wit. In that rich but delicate and 
subtile s]urit of drollery, moistening and softening whatever it 
touches like a gentle oil, and penetrating through all enfoldings 
and rigorous encnistments into the kernel of the ludicrous that 
is in everything, which mainly created Malvolio, and Shallow, 
and Slender, and Dogberry, and Verges, and Bottom, and Lance- 
lot, and Launce, and Costard, and Touchstone, and a score of 
other clowns, fools, and simpletons, and which, gloriously over- 
flowing in Falstaff, makes his wit exhilarate like wine, Shake- 
speare has had almost as few successors as he had predecessors. 

And in these and all his other delineations he has, like every 
other great poet, or artist, not merely observed and described, 
but, as we have said, created, or invented. It is often laid down 
that the drama should be a faithful picture or representation of 
real life ; or, if this doctrine be given up in regard to the tragic 
or more impassioned drama, because even kings and queens in 
the actual world never do declaim in the pomp of blank verse, as 
they do on the stage, still it is insisted that in comedy no 
character is admissible that is not a transcript, — a little em- 
bellished perhaps, — but still substantially a transcript from some 
genuine flesh and blood original. But Shakespeare has shown 
that it belongs to such an imagination as his to create in comedy, 
as well as in tragedy or in poetry of any other kind. Most of 
the characters that have just been mentioned are as truly the 
mere creations of the poet's brain as are Ariel, or Caliban, or the 
Witches in Macbeth. If any modern critic will have it that 
Sahkespeare must have actually seen Malvolio, and Launce, and 



SHAKESPEARE. 263 

ToTiclistone, before lie could or at least would have drawn them, 
we would ask the said critic if he himself has ever seen such 
characters in real life ; and, if he acknowledge, as he needs must, 
that he never has, we would then put it to him to tell us why 
the contemporaries of the great dramatist might not have enjoyed 
them in his plays without ever having seen them elsewhere, just 
as we do, — or, in other words, why such delineations might not 
have perfectly fulfilled their dramatic purpose then as well as 
now, when they certainly do not represent anything that is to be 
seen upon earth, any more than do Don Qnixote and Sancho Panza. 
There might have been professional clowns and fools in the age 
of Shakespeare such as are no longer extant ; but at no time did 
there ever actually exist such fools and clowns as his. These 
and other similar personages of the Shakespearian drama are as 
much mere poetical phantasmata as are the creations of the 
kindred humour of Cervantes. Are they the less amusing or in- 
teresting, however, on that account ? — do we the less sympathize 
with them ? — nay, do we feel that they are the less naturally 
drawn ? that they have for us less of a truth and life than the 
most faithful copies from the men and women of the real 
world ? 

But in the region of reality, too, there is no other drama so 
rich as that of Shakespeare. He has exhausted the old world of 
our actual experience as well as imagined for us new worlds 
of his own.* What other anatomist of the human heart has 
searched its hidden core, and laid bare all the strength and 
weakness of our mysterious nature, as he has done in the gush- 
ing tenderness of Juliet, and the "fine frenzy" of the discrowned 
Lear, and the sublime melancholy of Hamlet, and the wrath of 
the perplexed and tempest-torn Othello, and the eloquent mis- 
anthropy of Timon, and the fixed hate of Shylock ? What other 
poetry has given shape to anything half so terrific as Lady 
Macbeth, or so winning as Eosalind, or so full of gentlest 
womanhood as Desdemona ? In what other drama do we behold 
so living a humanity as in his ? W^ho has given us a scene 
either so crowded with diversities of character, or so stirred 
with the heat and hurry of actual existence ? The men and the 
manners of all countries and of all ages are there : the lovers 
and M'arriors, the priests and prophetesses, of the old heroic and 
kingly times of Greece, — the Athenians of the days of Pericles 
and Alcibiades, — the proud patricians and turbulent commonalty 
of the earliest period of republican Eome, — Ceesar, and Brutus, 

* " Each change of many-coloured life he drew, 

Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."— Johnson. 



264 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

and Cassius, and Antony, and Cleopatra, and the other splendid 
figures of that later Eoman scene, — the kings, and queens, and 
princes, and courtiers of barbaric Denmark, and Eoman Britain, 
and Britain before the Eomans, — those of Scotland in the time 
of the English Heptarchy, — those of England and France at the 
era of Magna Charta, — all ranks of the people of almost every 
reign of our subsequent history from the end of the fourteenth 
to the middle of the sixteenth century, — not to speak of Venice, 
and Yerona, and Mantua, and Padua, and lUyria, and Navarre, 
and the Forest of Arden, and all the other towns and lands 
which he has peopled for us with their most real inhabitants. 

Nor even in his plays is Shakespeare merely a dramatist. 
Apart altogether from his dramatic power he is the greatest 
poet that ever lived. His sympathy is the most universal, his 
imagination the most plastic, his diction the most expressive, 
ever given to any writer. His poetry has in itself the power and 
varied excellences of all other poetry. While in grandeur, and 
beauty, and passion, and sweetest music, and all the other higher 
gifts of song, he may be ranked with the greatest, — with Spenser, 
and Chaucer, and Milton, and Dante, and Homer, — he is at the 
same time more nervous than Dryden, and more sententious than 
Pope, and more sparkling and of more abounding conceit, when 
he chooses, than Donne, or Cowley, or Butler. In whose 
handling was language ever such a flame of fire as it is in his ? 
His wonderful potency in the use of this instrument would alone 
set him above all other writers.* Language has been called the 
costume of thought : it is such a costume as leaves are to the 
tree or blossoms to the flower, and grows out of what it adorns. 
Every great and original writer accordingly has distinguished, 
and as it wei-e individualised, himself as much by his diction as 
by even the sentiment which it embodies ; and the invention of 
such a distinguishing style is one of the most unequivocal 
evidences of genius. But Shakespeare has invented twenty 
styles. He has a style for every one of his great characters, by 

* Wliatever may be the extent of the vocabulary of the English language, 
it is certain that the most copious writer has not employed more than a frac- 
tion of the entire number of words of which it consists. It has been stated 
that some inquiries set on foot by the telegraph companies have led to the 
conclusion that the number of words in ordinary use does not exceed 3000. 
A rough calculation, founded on Mrs. Clarke's Concordance, gives about 
21,000 as the number to be found in the Plays of Shakespeare, without count- 
ing inflectional forms as distinct words. Probably the vocabulary of no other 
of our great writers is nearly so extensive. Todd's Verbal Index would not 
give us more than about 7000 for Milton ; so that, if we were to add even fifty 
per cent, to compensate for Milton's inferior voluminousness, the Miltonic 
vocabulary would still be not more than half as copious as the Shakespearian. 



SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES, 265 

which that character is distinguished from every other as much 
as Pope is distinguished by his style from Dryden, or Milton 
from Spenser. And yet all the while it is he himself with his 
own peculiar accent that we hear in every one of them. The 
style, or manner of expression, that is to say, — and, if the manner 
of expression, then also the manner of thinking, of which the 
expression is always the product— is at once both that which 
belongs to the particular character and that which is equally 
natural to the poet, the conceiver and creator of the character. 
This double individuality, or combination of two individuali- 
ties, is inherent of necessity in all dramatic writing ; it is what 
distinguishes the imaginative here from the literal, the artistic 
from the real, a scene of a play from a police report. No more 
in this than in any other kind of literature, properly so called, 
can we dispense with that infusion of the mind from which the 
work has proceeded, of something belonging to that mind and to 
no other, which is the very life or constituent principle of all 
art, the one thing that makes the difference between a creation 
and a copy, between the poetical and the mechanical. 



Dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare died in 1616. The space of a quarter of a 
century, or more, over which his career as a writer for the stage 
extends, is illustrated also by the names of a crowd of other 
dramatists, many of them of very remarkable genius ; but Shake- 
speare is distinguished from the greater number of his contem- 
poraries nearly as much as he is from his immediate predecessors. 
With regard to the latter, it has been well observed by a critic 
of eminent justness and delicacy of taste, that, while they " pos- 
sessed great power over the passions, had a deep insight into the 
darkest depths of human nature, and were, moreover, in the 
highest sense of the word, poets, of that higher power of creation 
with which Shakespeare was endowed, and by which he was 
enabled to call up into vivid existence all the various characters 
of men and all the events of human life, Marlow and his con- 
temporaries had no great share, — so that their best dramas may 
be said to represent to us only gleams and shadowings of mind, 
confused and hurried actions, from which we are rather led to 
guess at the nature of the persons acting before us than instan- 
taneously struck with a perfect knowledge of it ; and, even amid 
their highest efforts, with them the fictions of the drama are felt 
to be but faint semblances of reality. If we seek for a poetical 



266 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

image, a burst of passion, a beautiful sentiment, a trait of nature, 
we seek not in vain in the works of our very oldest dramatists. 
But none of the predecessors of Shakespeare must be thought of 
along with him, when he appears before us, like Prometheus, 
moulding the figures of men, and breathing into them the anima- 
tion and all the passions of life."* " The same," proceeds this 
writer, " may be said of almost all his illustrious contemporaries. 
Few of them ever have conceived a consistent character, and 
given a perfect drawing and colouring of it ; they have rarely, 
indeed, inspired us with such belief in the existence of their 
personages as we often feel towards those of Shakespeare, and 
which makes us actually unhappy unless we can fully under- 
stand everything about them, so like are they to living men. . . . 
The plans of their dramas are irregular and confused, their 
characters often wildly distorted, and an air of imperfection and 
incompleteness hangs in general over the whole composition ; so 
that the attention is wearied out, the interest flags, and we 
rather hurry on, than are hurried, to the horrors of the final 
catastrophe."! In other words, the generality of the dramatic 
writers who were contemporary with Shakespeare still belong 
to the semi-barbarous school which subsisted before he began to 
write. 



Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Of the dramatic writers of the present period that hold rank 
the nearest to Shakespeare, the names of Beaumont and Fletcher 
must be regarded as indicating one poet rather than two, for it is 
impossible to make anything of the contradictory accounts that 
have been handed down as to their respective shares in the plays 
published in their conjoint names, and the plays themselves 
furnish no evidence that is more decisive. The only ascertained 
facts relating to this point are the following : — that John Fletcher 
was about ten years older than his friend Francis Beaumont, the 
former having been bom in 1576, the latter in 1585; that 
Beaumont, however, so far as is known, came first before the 
world as a writer of poetry, his translation of the story of 
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, from the Fourth Book of Ovid's 
Metamorphoses, having been published in 1602, when he was 
only in his seventeenth year ; that the Masque of the Inner 
Temple and Gray's Inn (consisting of only a few pages), pro- 

* Analytical Essays on the Early English Dramatists (understood to be by 
the late Henry MacKenzie), in Blackwood's Magazine, vol. ii. p. 657. 
t Blackwood's Magazine, yoL ii. p. 657. 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 267 

duced in 1612, was written by Beaumont alone; that the 
pastoral drama of the Faithful Shepherdess is entirely Flet(3her's ; 
that the first published of the pieces which have been ascribed 
to the two associated together, the comedy of The Woman-Hater, 
appeared in 1607 ; that Beaumont died in March, 1616 ; and 
that, between that date and the death of Fletcher, in 1625, there 
were brought out, as appears from the not e-book of Sir Henry 
Herbert, Deputy Master of the Eevels, at least eleven of the 
plays found in the collection of their works, besides two others 
that were brought out in 1626, and two more that are lost. 
Deducting the fourteen pieces which thus appear certainly to 
belong to Fletcher exclusively (except that in one of them, The 
Maid in the Mill, he is said to have been assisted by Eowley), 
there still remain thirty-seven or thirty-eight which it is possible 
they may have written together in the nine or ten years over 
which their poetical partnership is supposed to have extended.* 
Eighteen of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, including the 
Masque by the former and the Pastoral by the latter, were pub- 
blished separately before 1640 ; thirty-four more were first pub- 
lished together in a folio volume in 1647 ; and the whole were 
reprinted, with the addition of a comedy, supposed to have been 
lost (The Wild Goose Chase), | making a collection of fifty-three 
pieces in all, in another folio, in 1679. Beaumont and Fletcher 
want altogether that white heat of passion by which Shakespeare 
fuses all things into life and poetry at a touch, often making a 
single brief utterance flash upon us a full though momentary 
view of a character, which all that follows deepens and fixes, 
and makes the more like to actual seeing with the eyes and 
hearing with the ears. His was a deeper, higher, in every way 
more extended and capacious nature than theirs. They want his 
profound meditative philosophy as much as they do his burning 
poetry. . IS' either have they avoided nearly to the same degree 
that he has done the degradation of their fine gold by the inter- 
mixture of baser metal. They have given us all sorts of writing, 
good, bad, and indifferent, in abundance. Without referring in 
particular to what we now deem the indecency and licentious- 
ness which pollutes all their plays, but which, strange to say, 
seems not to have been looked upon in that light by anybody in 
their own age, simply because it is usually wrapped in very 
transparent double entendre, they might, if judged by nearly one- 

* One, the comedy of The Coronation, is also attributed to Shirley. 

t This play, one of the best of Fletcher's comedies, for it was not produced 
till some years after Beaumont's death, had been previously recovered and 
printed bv itself in 1652. 



268 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

half of all they have left us, be held to belong to almost the 
lowest rank of onr dramatists instead of to the highest. There 
is scarcely one of their dramas that does not bear marks of haste 
and carelessness, or of a blight in some part or other from the 
playhouse tastes or compliances to which they were wont too 
easily to give themselves up when the louder applause of the 
day and the town made them thoughtless of their truer fame. 
But fortunately, on the other hand, in scarcely any of their 
pieces is the deformity thus occasioned more than partial : the 
circumstances in which they wrote have somewhat debased the 
produce of their fine genius, but their genius itself suffered 
nothing from the unworthy uses it was often put to. It springs 
up again from the dust and mud, as gay a creature of the 
element as ever, soaring and singing at heaven's gate as if it 
had never touched the ground. Nothing can go beyond the 
flow and brilliancy of the dialogue of these writers in their 
happier scenes ; it is the richest stream of real conversation, 
edged with the fire of poetry. For the drama of Beaumont and 
Fletcher is as essentially poetical and imaginative, though not in 
so high a style, as that of Shakespeare ; and they, too, even if 
they were not great dramatists, would still be great poets. 
Much of their verse is among the sweetest in the language ; 
and many of the lyrical passages, in particular, with which their 
plays are interspersed, have a diviner soul of song in them than 
almost any other compositions of the same class. As dramatists 
they are far inferior to Shakespeare, not only, as we have said, 
in striking development and consistent preservation of character, 
— in other words, in truth and force of conception, — but also 
both in the originality and the variety of their creations in that 
department ; they have confined themselves to a comparatively 
small number of broadly distinguished figures, which they 
delineate in a dashing, scene-painting fashion, bringing out their 
peculiarities rather by force of situation, and contrast with one 
another, than by the form and aspect with which each individually 
looks forth and emerges from the canvas. But all the resources 
of this inferior style of art they avail themselves of with the 
boldness of conscious power, and with wonderful skill and effect. 
Their invention of plot and incident is fertile in the highest 
degree ; and in the conduct of a story for the mere purposes of 
the stage,— for keeping the attention of an audience awake and 
their expectation suspended throughout the whole course of the 
action, — they excel Shakespeare, who, aiming at higher things, 
and producing his more glowing pictures by fewer strokes, is 
careless about the mere excitement of curiosity, whereas they 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 269 

are tempted to linger as long as possible over every scene, both 
for that end, and because their proper method of evolving cha- 
racter and passion is by such delay and repetition of touch upon 
touch. By reason principally of this difference, the plays of 
Beaumont and Fletcher, in the great days of the stage, and so 
long as the state of public manners tolerated their licence and 
grossness, were much greater favourites than those of Shake- 
speare in our theatres; two of theirs, Dryden tells us, were 
acted in his time for one of Shakespeare's ; their intrigues, — 
their lively and florid but not subtle dialogue, — their strongly- 
marked but somewhat exaggerated representations of character, 
— their exhibitions of passion, apt to run a little into the melo- 
dramatic, — were more level to the general apprehension, and 
were found to be more entertaining, than his higher art and 
grander poetry. Beaumont and Fletcher, as might be inferred 
from what has already been said, are, upon the whole, greater in 
comedy than in tragedy ; and they seem themselves to have felt 
that their genius led them more to the former, — for, of their 
plays, only ten are tragedies, while their comedies amount to 
twenty-four or twenty- five, the rest being what were then called 
tragi-comedies — in many of which, however, it is true, the 
interest is, in part at least, of a tragic character, although the 
story ends happily.* But, on the other hand, all their tragedies 
have also some comic passages ; and, in regard to this matter, 
indeed, their plays may be generally described as consisting, in 
the words of the prologue to one of them,! of 

" Passionate scenes mixed with no vulgar mirth." 

Undoubtedly, taking them all in all, they have left us the richest 
and most magnificent drama we possess after that of Shakespeare ; 
the most instinct and alive both with the true dramatic spirit 
and with that of general poetic beauty and power; the most 
brilliantly lighted up with wit and humour ; the freshest and 
most vivid, as well as various, picture of human manners and 
passions ; the truest mirror, and at the same time the finest em- 
bellishment, of nature. 

* The following definition of what was formerly understood by the term 
tragi-comedy, or tragic-comedy, is given by Fletcher in the preface to his 
Faithful Slaepherdess : — •" A tragic-comedy is not so called in respect of 
mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths (which is enough to make it 
no tragedy) : yet brmgs some near to it (which is enough to make it no 
comedy) : which [viz. tragic-comedy] must be a representation of familiar 
people, with such kind of trouble as no life can be without ; so that a god is 
as lawful in this as in a tragedy ; and mean people as in a comedy." 

t The Custom of the Country. 



270 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

JoNSOiT. 

Ben Jonson was "bom in 1574, or two years before Fletcher, 
whom he survived twelve years, dying in 1637. He is supposed 
to have begun to write for the stage so early as 1593 ; but 
nothing that he produced attracted any attention till his Comedy 
of Every Man in his Humour was brought out at the Eose 
Theatre in 1596. This play, greatly altered and improved, was 
published in 1598 : and between that date and his death Jonson 
produced above fifty more dramatic pieces in all, of which ten 
are comedies, three what he called comical satires, only two 
tragedies, and all the rest masques, pageants, or other court en- 
tertainments. His two tragedies of Sejanus and Catiline are 
admitted on all hands to be nearly worthless : and his fame lests 
almost entirely upon his first comedy, his three subsequent 
comedies of Volpone or The Fox, Epicoene or The Silent Woman, 
land The Alchemist, his court Masques, and a Pastoral entitled 
The Sad Shepherd, which was left unfinished at his death. Ben 
Jonson's comedies admit of no comparison with those of Shake- 
speare or of Beaumont and Fletcher : he belongs to another school. 
His plays are professed attempts to revive, in English, the old 
classic Koman drama, and aim in their construction at a rigorous 
adherence to the models afforded by those of Plautus, and 
Terence, and Seneca. They are admirable for their elaborate 
art, which is, moreover, informed by a power of strong concep- 
tion of a decidedly original character; they abound both in wit 
and eloquence, which in some passages rises to the glow of 
poetry ; the figures of the scene stand out in high relief, every 
one of them, from the most important to the most insignificant, 
being finished off at all points with the minutest care; the 
dialogue carries on the action, and is animated in many parts 
with the right dramatic reciprocation ; and the plot is in general 
contrived and evolved with the same learned skill, and the same 
attention to details, that are shown in all other particulars. 
But the execution, even where it is most brilliant, is hard and 
angular ; nothing seems to flow naturally and freely ; the whole 
has an air of constraint, and effort, and exaggeration ; and the 
effect that is produced by the most arresting passages is the most 
undramatic that can be, — namely, a greater sympathy with the 
performance as a work of art than as anything else. It may be 
added that Jonson's characters, though vigorously delineated, 
and though not perhaps absolutely false to nature, are most 
of them rather of the class of her occasional excrescences or 
eccentricities than samples of any general humanity; they are 



MASSINGER; FORD. 271 

the oddities and perversions of a particular age or state of 
manners, and have no universal truth or interest. What is 
called the humour of Jonson consists entirely in the exhibition 
of the more ludicrous kinds of these morbid aberrations ; like 
everything about him, it has force and raciness enough, but 
will be most relished by those who are most amused by dancing 
bears and other shows of that class. It seldom or noA'er makes 
the heart laugh, like the humour of Shakespeare, — which is, 
indeed, a quality of altogether another essence. • As a poet, 
Jonson is greatest in his masques and other court pageants. 
The airy elegance of these compositions is a perfect contrast to 
the stern and rugged strength of his other works ; the lyrical 
parts of them especially have often a grace and sportiveness, a 
flow as well as a finish, the effect of which is very brilliant. 
Still, even in these, we want the dewy light and rich coloured 
irradiation of the poetry of Shakespeare and Fletcher: the 
lustre is pure and bright, but at the same time cold and sharp, 
like that of crystal. In Jonson's unfinished pastoral of The Sad 
Shepherd there is some picturesque description and more \erj 
harmonious verse, and the best parts of it (much of it is poor 
enough) are perhaps in a higher style than anything else he has 
written ; but to compare it, as has sometimes been done, either 
as a poem or as a drama, with The Faithful Shepherdess of 
Fletcher seems to us to evince a deficiency of true feeling for the 
highest things, equal to what would be shown by preferring, as 
has also been done by some critics, the humour of Jonson to 
that of Shakespeare. Fletcher's pastoral, blasted as it is in some 
parts by fire not from heaven, is still a green and leaf}^ wilder- 
ness of poetical beauty ; Jonson's, deformed also by some brutality 
more elaborate than anything of the same sort in Fletcher, is at 
the best but a trim garden, and, had it been ever so happily 
finished, would have been nothing more. 



Massinger: Ford. 



After Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson, the 
next great name in our drama is that of Philip Massinger, who 
was born in 1584, and is supposed to have begun to write for 
the stage soon after 1606, although his first published play, his 
tragedy of The Virgin Martyr, in which he was assisted by 
Decker, did not appear till 1622. Of thirty-eight dramatic 
pieces which he is said to have written, only eighteen have been 



272 ENGLISH LITERATUKE AND LANGUAGE. 

preserved ; eight others were in the collection of Mr. Warburton, 
which his servant destroyed. Massinger, like Jonson, had 
received a learned education, and his classic reading has coloured 
his style and manner ; but he had scarcely so much originality 
of genius as Jonson. He is a very eloquent writer, but has little 
power of high imagination or pathos, and still less wit or comic 
power. He could rise, however, to a vivid conception of a charac- 
ter moved by some single aim or passion ; and he has drawn 
some of the darker shades of villany with great force. His 
Sir Giles Overreach, in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and his 
Luke in the City Madam, are perhaps his most successful 
delineations in this style. In the conduct of his plots, also, he 
generally displays much skill. , In short, all that can be reached 
by mere talent and warmth of susceptibility he has achieved ; 
but his province was to appropriate and decorate rather than to 
create. 

John Ford, the author of about a dozen plays that have sur- 
vived, and one of whose pieces is known to have been acted so 
early as 1613, has one quality, that of a deep pathos, perhaps 
more nearly allied to high genius than any Massinger has 
shown ; but the range of the latter in the delineation of action 
and passion is so much more extensive, that we can hardly 
refuse to regard him as the greater dramatist. Ford's blank 
verse is not so imposing as Massinger's ; but it has often a 
delicate beauty, sometimes a warbling wildness and richness, 
beyond anything in Massinger's fuller swell. 



Later Elizabethan Prose Wrtpers. 

By the end of the sixteenth century, our prose, as exhibited 
in its highest examples, if it had lost something in ease and 
clearness, had gained considerably in copiousness, in sonorous- 
ness, and in splendour. In its inferior specimens, also, a 
corresponding change is to be traced, but of a modified character. 
In these the ancient simplicity and directness had given place 
only to a long-winded wordiness, and an awkwardness and 
intricacy, sometimes so excessive as to be nearly unintelligible, 
produced by piling clause upon clause, and involution upon 
involution, in the endeavour to crowd into every sentence as 
much meaning or as many particulars as possible. Here the 
change was nearly altogether for the worse; the loss in one 
direction was compensated by hardly anything that could be 
called a gain in another. It ought also to be noticed that 



TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE. 273 

towards the close of tlie reign of Elizabeth a singularly artificial 
mode of composition became fashionable, more especially in 
sermons and other theological writings, consisting mainly in 
the remotest or most recondite analogies of thought and the 
most elaborate verbal ingenuities or conceits. This may be 
designated the opposite pole in popular preaching to what we 
have in the plainness and simplicity, natural sometimes even 
to buffoonery, of Latimer. 



Translation of the Bible. 



The authorized translation of the Bible, on the whole so 
admirable both for correctness and beauty of style, is apt, on the 
first thought, to be regarded as exhibiting the actual state of 
the language in the time of James I., when it was first pub- 
lished. It is to be remembered, howover, that the new transla- 
tion was formed, by the special directions of the king, upon the 
basis of that of Parker's, or the Bishops' Bible, which had been 
made nearl}'' forty years before, and which had itself been 
founded upon that of Cranmei, made in the reign of Henry YIII. 
The consequence is, as Mr. Hallam has remarked, that, whether 
the style of King. James's translation be the perfection of the 
English language or no, it is not the language of his reign. " It 
ma}^ in the eyes of many," adds Mr. Hallam, " be a better 
English, but it is not the English of Daniel, or Ealeigh, or 
Bacon, as any one m.ay easily perceive. It abounds, in fact, 
especially in the Old Testament, with obsolete phraseology, and 
with single words long since abandoned, or retained only in 
provincial use."* This is, perhaps, rather strongly put; for 
although the preceding version served as a general guide to 
the translators, and was not needlessly deviated from, they have 
evidently modernized its style, not perhaps quite up to that of 
their own day, but so far, we apprehend, as to exclude nearly all 
words and phrases that had then passed out even of common and 
familiar use. In that theological age, indeed, few forms of 
expression found in the Bible could well have fallen altogether 
into desuetude, although some may have come to be less apt and 
significant than they once were, or than others that might now 
be substituted for them. But we believe the new translators, in 
any changes they made, were very careful to avoid the employ- 
ment of any mere words of yesterday, the glare of whose recent 
coinage would have contrasted offensively with the general 

* Lit. of Eur. ii. 464. 

T 



274 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

antique colour of diction which, they desired to retain. If ever 
their version were to be revised, whether to improve the render- 
ing of some passages by the lights of modern criticism, or to 
mend some hardness and intricacy of construction in others, 
it ought to be retouched in the same spirit of aiFectionate 
veneration for the genius and essential characteristics of its 
beautiful diction; and a good rule to be laid down might be, 
that no word should be admitted in the improved renderings 
which was not in use in the age when the translation was 
originally made. The language was then abundantly rich enough 
to furnish all the words that could be wanted for the purpose. 



Theological Writers : — Bishop Andrews ; Donne ; Hall ; 
Hooker. 

Besides the translation of the Bible, the portion of the English 
literature of the present period that is theological is very great 
in point of quantity, and a part of it also possesses distinguished 
claims to notice in a literary point of view. Eeligion was the 
great subject of speculation and controversy in this country 
throughout the entire space of a century and a half between the 
Eeformation and the Ee volution. 

One of the most eminent preachers, perhaps the most eminent, 
of the age of Elizabeth and James, was Dr. Lancelot Andrews, 
who, after having held the sees of Chichester and Ely, died 
bishop of Winchester in 1626. Bishop Andrews was one of the 
translators of the Bible, and is the author, among other works, of 
a folio volume of Sermons published, by direction of Charles I., 
soon after his death ; of another folio volume of Tracts and 
Speeches, which appeared in 1629 ; of a third volume of Lectures 
on the Ten Commandments, published in 1642; and of a fourth, 
containing Lectures delivered at St. Paul's and at St. Giles's, 
Cripplegate, published in 1657. Both the learning and ability 
of Andrews are conspicuous in everything he has written ; 
but his eloquence, nevertheless, is to a modern taste grotesque 
enough. In his more ambitious passages he is the very prince of 
verbal posture-masters, — if not the first in date, the first in 
extravagance, of the artificial, quibbling, syllable-tormenting 
school of our English pulpit rhetoricians ; and he undoubtedly 
contributed more to spread the disease of that manner of writing 
than any other individual. 

Donne, the poet, was also a voluminous writer in prose ; 
having left a folio volume of Sermons, besides a treatise against 



HOOKER; BACON. 275 

Popery entitled The Pseudo-Martyr, another singular perform- 
ance, entitled Biathanatos, in confutation of the common notion 
about the necessary sinfulness of suicide, and some other pro- 
fessional disquisitions. His biographer, Izaak Walton, says 
that he preached " as an angel, /rom a cloud, but not in a cloud;" 
but most modern readers will probably be of opinion that he has 
not quite made his escape from it. His manner is fully as quaint 
in his prose as in his verse, and his way of thinking as subtle 
and peculiar. 

Another of the most learned theologians and eloquent preachers 
of those times was as well as Donne an eminent poet. Bishop 
Joseph Hall. Hall's English prose works, which are very volu- 
minous, consist of sermons, polemical tracts, paraphrases of Scrip- 
ture, casuistical divinity, and some pieces on practical religion, 
of which his Contemplations, his Art of Divine Meditation, and his 
Enochismus, or Treatise on the Mode of Walking with God, are 
the most remarkable. The poetic temperament of Hall reveals 
itself in his prose as well as in his verse, by the fervour of his 
piety, and the forcible and often picturesque character of his 
style. 

Last of all may be mentioned, among the great theological 
writers of this great theological time, one who stands alone, 
Eichard Hooker, the illustrious author of the Eight Books of 
the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity ; of which the first four were 
published in 1594, the fifth in 1597, the three last not till 1632, 
many years after the author's death. Hooker's style is almost 
without a rival for its sustained dignity of march; but that 
which makes it most remarkable is its union of all this learned 
gravity and correctness with a flow of genuine, racy English, 
almost as little tinctured with pedantry as the most familiar 
popular writing. The effect also of its evenness of movement is 
the very reverse of tameness or languor ; the full river of the 
argument dashes over no precipices, but yet rolls along without 
pause, and with great force and buoyancy. 



Bacon. 

Undoubtedly the principal figure in English prose literature, 
as well as in philosophy, during the first quarter of the seven- 
teenth century, is Francis Bacon. Bacon, born in 1661, pub- 
lished the first edition of his Essays in 1597 ; his Two Books of 
the Advancement of Learning in 1605; his Wisdom of the 
Ancients (in Latin) in 1610 ; a third edition of his Essays, greatly 



276 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

extended, in 1612; his Two Books of the Kovum Organum, or 
Second Part of the Instauratio Magna, designed to consist of Six 
Parts (also in Latin), in 1620 ; his History of the Eeign of 
Henry VIL, in 1622 ; his Nine Books De Augmentis Scientiarum, 
a Latin translation and extension of his Advancement of Learn- 
ing, in 1623. Pie died in 1626. The originality of the Baconian 
or Inductive method of philosophy, the actual sei-vice it has 
rendered to science, and even the end which it may be most cor- 
recti}^ said to have in view, have all been subjects of dispute 
almost ever since Bacon's own day; but, notwithstanding all 
differences of opinion upon these points, the acknowledgment that 
he was intellectually one of the most colossal of the sons of men 
has been nearly unanimous. They who have not seen his great- 
ness under one form have discovered it in another; there is a 
discordance among men's ways of looking at him, or their theories 
respecting him; but the mighty shadow which he projects 
athwart the two bygone centuries lies there immovable, and 
still extending as time extends. The very deductions which are 
made from his merits in regard to particular points thus only 
heighten the impression of his general eminence, — of that some- 
thing about him not fully understood or discerned, which, spite 
of all curtailment of his claims in regard to one special kind of 
eminence or another, still leaves the sense of his eminence as 
strong as ever. As for his Novum Organum, or so-called new 
instrument of philosophy, it may be that it was not really new 
when he announced it as such, either as a process followed in the 
practice of scientific discovery, or as a theory of the right method 
of discovery. Neither may Bacon have been the first writer, in 
hi's own or the immediately preceding age, who recalled attention 
to the inductive method, or who pointed out the barrenness of 
what was then called philosophy in the schools. Nor can it be 
affirmed that it was really he who brought the reign of that 
philosophy to a close : it was falling fast into disrepute before he 
assailed it, and would probably have passed away quite as soon 
as it did although his writings had never appeared. Nor possibly 
has he either looked at that old philosophy with a very pene- 
trating or comprehensive eye, or even shown a perfect under- 
standing of the inductive method in all its applications and 
principles. As for his attempts in the actual practice of the in- 
ductive method, they were, it must be owned, either insignificant 
or utter failures ; and that, too, while some of his contemporaries, 
who in no respect acknowledged him as their teacher, were 
turning it to account in extorting from nature the most brilliant 
revelations. But this was not Bacon's proper province. He 



BURTON. 277 

belongs not to mathematical or natural science, but to literatuie 
and to moral science in its most extensive acceptation, — to 
tbe realm of imagination, of wit, of eloquence, of eestbetics, 
of history, of jurisprudence, of political philosophy, of logic, of 
metaphysics and the investigation of the powers and operations 
of the human mind. He is either not at all or in no degree 
worth mentioning an investigator or expounder of mathematics, 
or of mechanics, or of astronomy, or of chemistry, or of any other 
branch of geometrical or physical science ; but he is a most pene- 
trating and comprehensive investigator, and a most magniiicent 
expounder, of that higher wisdom in comparison v>^iih which all 
these things are but a more intellectual sort of legerdemain. All 
his works, his essays, his philosophical vv^ritings, commonly so 
called, and what he has done in history, are of one and the same 
character; reflective and, so to speak, poetical, not simply de- 
monstrative, or elucidatory of mere matters of fact. \\ hat, then, 
is his glory ? — in what did his greatness consist ? In this, we 
should say ; — that an intellect at once one of the most capacious 
and one of the most profound ever granted to a mortal — in its 
powers of vision at the same time one of the most penetrating and 
one of the most far-reaching — w^as in him united and reconciled 
with an almost equal endowment of the imaginative faculty ; and 
that he is, therefore, of all philosophical writers, the one in whom 
are found together, in the largest proportions, depth of thought 
and splendour of eloquence. His intellectual ambition, also, — a 
quality of the imagination, — was of the most towering character ; 
and no other philosophic writer has taken up so grand a theme 
as that on which he has laid out his strength in his greatest 
works. But with the progress of scientilic discovery that has 
taken place during the last two hundred years, it would be diffi- 
cult to show that these works have had almost anything to do. 
His Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organum have 
more in them of the spirit of poetry than of science ; and we 
should almost as soon think of fathering modern physical science 
upon Paradise Lost as upon them. 



Burton. 

A remarkable prose work of this age, which ought not to be 
passed over without notice, is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 
Eobert Burton, who, on his title-page, takes the name of Democri- 
tus Junior, died in 1640, and his book was first published in 1621. 
It is an extraordinary accumulation of out-of-the-way learning, 



278 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

interspersed, somewliat in tlie manner of Montaigne's Essays, 
with, original matter, but with, this among other differences, — 
that in Montaigne the quotations have the air of being introduced, 
as we know that in fact they were, to illustrate the original 
matter, w^hich is the web of the discourse, they but the em- 
broidery ; whereas in Burton the learning is rather the web, 
upon which what he has got to say of his own is worked in by 
way of forming a sort of decorative figure. Burton is far from 
having the variety or abundance of Montaigne ; but there is con- 
siderable point and penetration in his style, and he says many 
striking things in a sort of half-sj)lenetic, half-jocular humour, 
which many readers have found wonderfully stimulating. Dr. 
Johnson declared that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was the 
only book that ever drew him out of bed an hour sooner than he 
would otherwise have got up. 



Historical Writers. 



Among the historical writers of the reign of James may be first 
mentioned the all-accomplished Sir Walter Ealeigh. Ealeigh is 
the author of a few short poems, and of some miscellaneous pieces 
in prose ; but his great work is his History of the World, com- 
posed during his imprisonment in the Tower, and first published 
in a folio volume in 1614. It is an unfinished work, coming 
down only to the first Macedonian war ; and there is no reason 
to suppose that an}'' more of it was ever written, although it has 
been asserted that a second volume was burnt by the author. 
Ealeigh's History, as a record of facts, has long been superseded ; 
the interest it possesses at the present day is derived almost en- 
tirely from its literary merits, and from a few passages in which 
the author takes occasion to allude to circumstances that have 
fallen within his own experience. Much of it is written without 
any ambition of eloquence ; but the style, even where it is most 
careless, is still lively and exciting, from a tone of the actual 
world which it preserves, and a certain frankness and heartiness 
coming from Ealeigh's profession and his warm impetuous cha- 
racter. It is not disfigured by any of the petty pedantries to 
some one or other of which most of the writers of books in that 
day gave way more or less, and it has altogether comparatively 
little of the taint of age upon it ; while in some passages the 
com^DOsition, without losing anything of its natural gi'ace and 
heartiness, is wrought up to great rhetorical polish and elevation. 

Another celebrated historical work of this time is Kichard 



HISTORICAL WRITERS. 279 

Knolles's History of tlie Turks, published in 1610. Johnson, 
in one of his Eamblers, has awarded to Knolles the first place 
among English historians ; and Mr. Hallam concurs in thinking 
that his style and power of narration have not been too highly 
extolled by that critic. " His descriptions," continues Mr. 
Hallam, " are vivid and animated ; circumstantial, but not to 

feebleness ; his characters are drawn with a strong pencil 

In the style of Knolles there is sometimes, as Johnson has hinted, 
a slight excess of desire to make every phrase effective ; but he 
is exempt from the usual blemishes of his age ; and his com- 
mand of the language is so extensive, that we should not err in 
placing him among the first of our elder writers."* Much of 
this praise, however, is to be considered as given to the uni- 
formity or regularity of Knolles's style ; the chief fault of which 
perhaps is, that it is too continuously elaborated and sustained 
for a long work. We have already mentioned Samuel Daniel's 
History of England from the Conquest to the reign of Ed- 
ward III., which was published in 1618. It is of little his- 
torical value, but is remarkable for the same simple ease and 
purity of language which distinguish Daniel's verse. The con- 
tribution to this department of literature of all those that the 
early part of the seventeenth century produced, which is at 
the same time the most valuable as an original authority and 
the most masterly in its execution, is undoubtedly Bacon's 
History of the reign of Henry VII. 

* Lit. of Eur. iii. 872. 



280 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 



MIDDLE AND LATTER PAET OF THE SEVENTEENTH 
CENTURY. 

Excluding from our view the productions of the last fifty or 
sixty years, as not yet ripe for the verdict of history, we may 
affirm that our national literature, properly so called, that is, 
whatever of our literature by right of its poetic shape or spirit is 
to be held as peculiarly belonging to the language and the 
country, had its noonday in the period comprehending the last 
quarter of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth century. 
But a splendid afternoon flush succeeded this meridian blaze, 
which may be said to have lasted for another half century, or 
longer. Down almost to the Revolution, or at least to the middle 
of the reign of Charles II., our higher literature continued to 
glow with more or less of the coloured light and the heart of fire 
which it had acquired in the age of Elizabeth and James. Some 
of the greatest of it indeed— as the verse of Milton and the prose 
poetry of Jeremy Taylor — was not given to the world till towards 
the close of the space we have just indicated. But Milton, and 
Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Cudworth, and Henry 
More, and Cowley, the most eminent of our English writers in 
the interval from the Restoration to the Revolution (if we except 
Dryden, the founder of a new school, and Barrow, whose > 
writings, full as they are of thought, have not much of the 
poetical or untranslatable) were all of them, it is worthy of 
observation, born before the close of the reign of James I. Nor 
would the stormy time that followed be without its nurture for 
such minds. A boyhood or youth passed in the days of Shakes- 
peare and Bacon, and a manhood in those of the Great Rebellion, 
was a training which could not fail to rear high powers to their 
highest capabilities. 



Shirley, and the End of the Old Drama. 

The chief glory of our Elizabethan literature, however, belongs 
almost exclusively to the time we have already gone over. The 
only other name that remains to be mentioned to complete our 
sketch of the great age of the Drama, is that of James Shirley, 



SHIRLEY, AND THE END OF THE OLD DRAMA. 281 

who was born about the year 1594, and whose first play, the 
comedy of The Wedding, was published in 1629. He is the 
author of about forty dramatic pieces which have come down to 
us. " Shirley," observes Lamb, " claims a place among the 
worthies of this period, not so much for any transcendent genius 
in himself, as that he was the last of a great race, all of whom 
spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings 
and notions in common. A new language and quite a new turn 
of tragic and comic interest came in with the Eestoration." * Of 
this writer, who survived till 1666, the merits and defects have 
been well stated, in a few comprehensive words, by Mr. 
Hallam : — " Shirley has no originality, no force in conceiving or 
deliceating character, little of pathos, and less, perhaps, of wit; 
his dramas produce no deep impression in reading, and of course 
can leave none in the memory. But his mind was poetical : his 
betler characters, especially females, express pure thoughts in 
pure language ; he is never tumid or affected, and seldom obscure ; 
the incidents succeed rapidly ; the personages are numerous, and 
there is a general animation in the scenes, which causes us to 
read him with some pleasure." f 

A preface by Shirley is prefixed to the first collection of part 
of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, which, as already men- 
tioned, appeared in 1647. " Now, reader," he says, " in this 
tragical age, where the theatre hath been so much outacted, con- 
gratulate thy own happiness that, in this silence of the stage, 
thou hast a liberty to read these inimitable plays, — to dwell and 
converse in these immortal groves, — which were only showed 
our fathers in a conjuring-glass, as suddenly removed as repre- 
sented." At this time all theatrical amusements were prohibited ; 
and the publication of these and of other dramatic productions 
which were their property, or rather the sale of them to the 
booksellers, was resorted to by the players as a way of making a 
little money when thus cut off from the regular gains of their 
profession ; the eagerness of the public to possess the said works 
in print being of course also sharpened by the same cause. 

The permanent suppression of theatrical entertainments was 
the act of the Long Parliament. An ordinance of the Lords and 
Commons passed on the 2nd of September, 1642, — after setting 
forth that "public sports do not well agree with public cala- 
mities, nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation, 
this being an exercise of sad and pious solemnity, and the other 
being spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious 
mirth and levit}^" — ordained, " that, while these sad causes and 
* Specimens, ii. 119. t Lit. of Eur. iii. 345. 



282 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

set times of humiliation do continue, public stage-plays shall 
cease and be forborne." It has been plausibly conjectured that 
this measure originated, " not merely in a spirit of religious dis- 
like to dramatic performances, but in a politic caution, lest play- 
writers and players should avail themselves of their power over 
the minds of the people to instil notions and opinions hostile to 
the authority of a puritanical parliament."* This ordinance cer- 
tainly put an end at once to the regular performance of plays ; 
although it is known to have been occasionally infringed . 



Giles Fletcher; Phineas Fletcher. 

Nor is the poetical produce other than dramatic of the quarter 
of a century that elapsed from the death of James to the establish- 
ment of the Commonwealth, of very considerable amount. Giles 
and Phineas Fletcher were brothers, cousins of the dramatist, and 
both clergymen. Giles, who died in 1623, is the author of a 
poem entitled Christ's Victory and Triumph in Heaven and 
Earth over and after Death, which was published in a quarto 
volume in 1610. It is divided into four parts, and is written in 
stanzas somewhat like those of Spenser, only containing eight 
lines each instead of nine : both the Fletchers, indeed, were pro- 
fessed disciples and imitators of the great author of the Fairy 
Queen. Phineas, who survived till 1650, published in 1633, 
along with a small collection of Piscatory Eclogues and other 
Poetical Miscellanies, a long allegorical poem, entitled The Purple 
Island, in twelve Books or Cantos, written in a stanza of seven 
lines. The idea upon which this performance is founded is one 
of the most singular that ever took possession of the brain even of 
an allegorist : the purple island is nothing else than the human 
body, and the poem is, in fact, for the greater part, a system of 
anatomy, nearly as minute in its details as if it were a scientific 
treatise, but wrapping up everything in a fantastic guise of 
double meaning, so as to produce a languid sing-song of laborious 
riddles, which are mostly unintelligible without the very know- 
ledge they make a pretence of conveying. After he has finished 
his anatomical course, the author takes up the subject of psycho- 
logy, which he treats in the same luminous and interesting 
manner. Such a work as this has no claim to be considered a 
poem even of the same sort with the Fairy Queen. In Spenser, 
the allegory, whether historical or moral, is little more than 
formal : the poem, taken in its natural and obvious import, as a 
* Collier, Hist. Dram. Poet. ii. 106. 



GILES FLETCHER ; PHINEAS FLETCHER. 283 

tale of " kniglits' and ladies' gentle deeds" — a song of their 
" fierce wars and faithful loves" — has meaning and interest 
enough, without the allegory at all, which, indeed, except in a 
very few passages, is so completely concealed behind the direct 
narrative, that we may well suppose it to have been nearly as 
much lost sight of and forgotten by the poet himself as it is by 
his readers : here, the allegory is the soul of every stanza and of 
every line — that which gives to the whole work whatever 
meaning, and consequently whatever poetry, it possesses — with 
which, indeed, it is sometimes hard enough to be understood, but 
without which it would be absolute inanity and nonsense. The 
Purple Island is rather a production of the same species with 
Dr. Darwin's Botanic Garden ; but, forced and false enough as 
Darwin's style is in many respects, it would be doing an injustice 
to his poem to compare it with Phineas Fletcher's, either in 
regard to the degree in which nature and propriety are violated 
in the principle and manner of the composition, or in regard to 
the spirit and general success of the execution. Of course, there 
is a good deal of ingenuity shown in Fletcher's poem ; and it is 
not unimpregnated by poetic feeling, nor without some passages 
of considerable merit. But in many other parts it is quite gro- 
tesque ; and, on the whole, it is fantastic, puerile, and wearisome. 



Other Eeligious Poets : — Quarles ; Herbert ; Herrick ; 
Crashaw. 

The growth of the religious spirit in the early part of the 
seventeenth century is shown in much more of the poetry of the 
time as well as in that of the two Fletchers. Others of the most 
notable names of this age are Quarles, Herrick, Herbert, and 
Crashaw. Francis Quarles, who died in 1644, was one of the 
most popular as well as voluminous writers of the day, and is 
still generally known by his volume of Emblems. His verses 
are characterized by ingenuity rather than fancy, but, although 
often absurd, he is seldom dull or languid. There is a good 
deal of spirit and coarse vigour in some of his pieces, as for 
instance in his well-known Song of Anarchus, portions of which 
have been printed both by Ellis and Campbell, and which may 
perhaps have suggested to Cowper, the great religious poet of a 
later day, his lines called The Modern Patriot. Quarles, how- 
ever, though he appears to have been a person of considerable 
literary acquirement, must in his poetical capacity be regarded 
a.s mainly a writer for the populace. George Herbert, a younger 



284 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

brother of the celebrated Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 
was a clergyman. His volume, entitled The Temple, was first 
published soon after his death in 1633, and was at least six or 
seven times reprinted in the course of the next quarter of a 
century. His biographer, Izaak Walton, tells us that when he 
wrote, in the reign of Charles II., twenty thousand copies of it 
had been sold. Herbert was an intimate friend of Donne, and 
no doubt a great admirer of his poetry ; but his own has been to 
a great extent preserved from the imitation of Donne's peculiar 
style, into which it might in other circumstances have fallen, 
in all probability by its having been composed with little effort 
or elaboration, and chiefly to relieve and amuse his own mind by 
the melodious expression of his favourite fancies and contempla- 
tions. His quaintness lies in his thoughts rather than in their 
expression, which is in general sufficiently simple and luminous. 
Eobert Herrick, who was also a clergyman, is the author of a 
thick octavo volume of verse, published in 1648, under the title 
of Hesperides. It consists, like the poetry of Donne, partly of 
love verses, partly of pieces of a devotional character, or, as the 
two sorts are styled in the title-page. Works Human and Divine. 
The same singular licence which even the most reverend per- 
sons, and the purest and most religious minds, in that age allowed 
themselves to take in light and amatorj^ poetry is found in 
Herrick as well as in Donne, a good deal of whose singular 
manner, and fondness for conceits both of sound and sense, 
Herrick has also caught. Yet some both of his hymns and of 
his anacreontics — for of such stxange intermixture does his 
poetry consist — are beautifully simple and natural, and full of 
grace as well as fancy. Eichard Crashaw was another clergj^- 
man, who late in life became a Eoman Catholic, and died a canon 
of Loretto in 1650. He is perhaps, after Donne, the greatest of 
these religious poets of the early part of the seventeenth century. 
He belongs in manner to the same school with Donne and 
Herrick, and in his lighter pieces he has much of their Ij^rical 
sweetness and delicacy; but there is often a force and even 
occasionally what may be called a grandeur of imagination in 
his more solemn poetry which Herrick never either reaches or 
aspires to. 



Cartweight; Eandolph; Corbet. 

All the poetical clergymen of this time, however, had not 
such pious muses. The Eev. William Cartwright, who died at 
an early age in 1643, is said by Anthony Wood to have been " a 



CARTWRIGHT; RANDOLPH; CORBET. 285 

most florid and seraphic preacher;" but his poetry, which is 
mostly amatory, is not remarkable for its brilliancy. He is the 
author of several plays, and he was one of the young writers 
who were honoured with the title of his sons by Ben Jonson, 
who said of him, " My son Cartwright writes all like a man." 
Another of Ben's poetical sons was Thomas Eandolph, who was 
likewise a clergyman, and is also the author of several plays, 
mostly in verse, as well as of a quantity of other poetry. Ean- 
dolph has a good deal of fancy, and his verse flows very melo- 
diously ; but his poetry has in general a bookish and borrowed 
air. Much of it is on subjects of love and gallantry ; but 
the love is chiefly of the head, or, at most, of the senses — the 
gallantry, it is easy to see, that merely of a fellow of a college 
and a reader of Ovid. Eandolph died under thirty in 1634, and 
his poems were first collected after his death by his brother. 
The volume, which also contains his Plays, was frequently re- 
printed in the course of the next thirty or forty years ; the 
edition before us, dated lti68, is called the fifth. 

One of the most remarkable among the clerical poets of this 
earlier half of the seventeenth century was Dr. Eichard Corbet, 
successively Bishop of Oxford and of Norwich. Corbet, who 
was born in 1582, became famous both as a poet and as a wit 
early in the reign of James ; but very little, if any, of his poetry 
was published till after his death, which took place in 1635. 
It is related, that after Corbet was a doctor of divinity he 
once sang ballads at the Cross at Abingdon : " On a market 
day," Aubrey writes, " he and some of his comrades were 
at the tavern by the Cross (which, by the way, was then the 
finest in England ; 1 remember it when I was a freshman ; it 
was admirable curious Gothic architecture, and fine figures 
in the niches ; 'tM'-as one of those built by King .... for his 
Queen). The ballad-singer complained he had no custom — he 
could not put ofi" his ballads. The jolly doctor puts oif his 
gown, and puts on the ballad-singer's leathern jacket, and, 
being a handsome man, and a rare full voice, he presently vended 
a great many, and had a great audience." Aubrey had heard, 
however, that as a bishop " he had an admirable grave and 
venerable aspect." Corbet's poetry, too, is a mixture or alter- 
nation of gravity and drollery. But it is the subject or occasion, 
rather than the style or manner, that makes the difi'erence ; he 
never rises to anything higher than wit ; and he is as witty in 
his elegies as in his ballads. As that ingredient, however, is not 
so suitable for the former as for the latter, his graver per- 
formances are worth very little. Nor is his merriment of a high 



286 E^^GLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

order ; when it is most elaborate it is strained and fantastic, and 
when more natural it is apt to run into buffoonery. But much 
of his verse, indeed, is merely prose in rhj^me, and very indif- 
ferent rhyme for the most part. His happiest effusions are the 
two that are best known, his Journey into France and his ballad 
of The Fairies' Farewell. His longest and most curious poem is 
his Iter Boreale, describing a journey which he took in company 
with other three university men, probably about 1620, from 
Oxford as far north as Newark and back again. 



Poets of the French School: — Carew; Lovelace; 
Suckling. 

Both our poetry and our prose eloquence continued to be 
generally infected by the spirit of quaintness and conceit, or 
over-refinement and subtlety of thought, for nearly a century 
after the first introduction among us of that fashion of writing. 
Even some of the highest minds did not entirely escape the 
contagion. If nothing of it is to be found in Spenser or Milton, 
neither Shakespeare nor Bacon is altogether free from it. Of 
our writers of an inferior order, it took captive not only the 
greater number, but some of the greatest, who lived and wrote 
from the middle of the reign of Elizabeth to nearly the middle of 
that of Charles II. — from Bishop Andrews, whom we have 
already mentioned, in prose, and Donne both in prose and verse, 
to Cowley inclusive. The style in question appears to have 
been borrowed • from Italy : it came in, at least, with the study 
and imitation of the Italian poetr3% being caught apparently 
from the school of Petrarch, or rather of his later followers, 
about the same time that a higher inspiration was drawn from 
Tasso and Ariosto. It is observable that the species or de23art- 
ments of our poetry which it chiefly invaded were those which 
have always been more or less influenced by foreign models : 
it made comparatively little impression upon our dramatic 
poetry, the most truly native portion of our literature ; but our 
lyrical and elegiac, our didactic and satirical verse, was overrun 
and materially modified by it, as we have said, for nearly a 
whole century. The return to a more natural manner, however, 
was begun to be made long before the expiration of that term. 
And, as we had received the malady from one foreign literature, 
so we were indebted for the cure to another. It is commonly 
assumed that our modem English poetrj^ first evinced a dis- 
position to imitate that of France after the Restoration. But 



CAREW; LOVELACE. 287 

the truth is that the influence of French literature had begun to 
be felt by our own at a considerably earlier date. The court 
of Charles I. was far from being so thoroughly French as that of 
Charles II. ; but the connexion established between the two 
kingdoms through Queen Henrietta could not fail to produce a 
partial imitation of French models both in writing and in other 
things. The distinguishing characteristic of French poetry (and 
indeed of French art generally), neatness in the dressing of the 
thought, had already been carried to considerable height by 
Malherbe, Eacan, Malleville, and others ; and these writers are 
doubtless to be accounted the true fathers of our own Waller, 
Carew, Lovelace, and Suckling, who all began to write about 
this time, and whose verses may be said to have first exemplified 
in our lighter poetry what may be done by correct and natural 
expression, smoothness of flow, and all that lies in the ars celare 
artem — the art of making art itself seem nature. Of the four, 
Waller was perhaps first in the field ; but he survived almost till 
the Eevolution, and did not rise to his greatest celebrity till 
after the Restoration, so that he will more fitly fall to be noticed 
in a subsequent page. The other three all belong exclusively to 
the times of Charles I. and of the Commonwealth. 

Thomas Carew, st^^ed on the title-page " One of the Gentle- 
men of the Privy Chamber, and Sewer in Ordinary to His 
Majesty," is the author of a small volume of poetry first printed 
in 1640, the year after his death. In polish and evenness of 
movement, combined with a diction elevated indeed in its tone, 
as it must needs be by the very necessities of verse, above that 
of mere good conversation, but yet in ease, lucidity, and direct- 
ness rivalling the language of ordinary life, Carew's poetry is 
not inferior to Waller's ; and, while his expression is as correct 
and natural, and his numbers as harmonious, the music of his 
verse is richer, and his imagination is warmer and more florid. 
But the texture of his composition is in general extremely slight, 
the substance of most of his pieces consisting merely of the elabo- 
ration of some single idea ; and, if he has more tenderness than 
Waller, he is far from having so much dignity, variety, or power 
of sustained efibrt. 

The poems of Colonel Eichard Lovelace are contained in two 
small volumes, one entitled Lucasta, published in 1649 ; the 
other entitled Posthume Poems, published by his brother in 1669, 
the year after the author's death. They consist principally of 
songs and other short pieces. Lovelace's songs, which are mostly 
amatory, are many of them carelessly enough written, and there 
are very few of them not defaced by some harshness or deformity ; 



288 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

but a few of his best pieces are as sweetly versified as Carew's, 
with perhaps greater variety of fanc}^ as well as more of vital 
force ; and a tone of chivalrous gentleness and honour gives to 
some of them a pathos beyond the reach of any mere poetic art. 

Lovelace's days, darkened in their close by the loss of every- 
thing except honour, were cut short at the age of forty; his 
contemporary. Sir John Suckling, who moved gaily and thought- 
lessly through his short life as through a dance or a merry game, 
died, in 1641, at that of thirty-two. Suckling, who is the author 
of a small collection of poems, as well as of four plays, has none 
of the pathos of Lovelace or Carew, but he equals them in fluency 
and natural grace of manner, and he has besides a spi'ightliness 
and buoyancy which is all his own. His poetry has a more 
impulsive air than theirs ; and, while, in reference to the greater 
jDart of what he has produced, he must be classed along with 
them and Waller as an adherent to the French school of pro- 
priety and precision, some of the happiest of his effusions are 
remarkable for a cordiality and impetuosity of manner which has 
nothing foreign about it, but is altogether English, although there 
is not much resembling it in any of his predecessors any more 
than of his contemporaries, unless perhaps in some of Skelton's 
pieces. His famous ballad of The Wedding is the very perfection 
of gaiety and archness in verse ; and his Session of the Poets, in 
which he scatters about his wit and humour in a more careless 
stjde, may be considered as constituting him the founder of a 
species of satire, which Cleveland and Marvel and other subse- 
quent writers carried into new applications, and which only 
expired among us with Swift. 



Den HAM. 

To this date belongs a remarkable poem, the Cooper's Hill of 
Sir John Denham, first published in 1642. It immediately drew 
universal attention. Denham, however, had the year before 
made himself known as a poet by his tragedy of The Sophy, on 
the appearance of which Waller remarked that he had broken 
out like the Irish rebellion, threescoi-e thousand strong, when 
nobody was aware or in the least suspected it. Cooper's Hill 
may be considered as belonging in point of composition to the 
same school with Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum ; and, if it 
has not all the concentration of that poem, it is equally pointed, 
correct, and stately, with, partly owing to the subject, a warmer 
tone of imagination and feeling, and a fuller swell of verse. The 



CLEVELAND. 289 

spirit of tlie same classical style pervades both ; and they are the 
two greatest poems in that style which had been produced down 
to the date at which we are now arrived. Denham is the author 
of a number of other compositions in verse, and especially of 
some songs and other shorter pieces, several of which are very 
spirited ; but the fame of his principal poem has thrown every- 
thing else he has written into the shade. It is remarkable that 
many biographical notices of this poet make him to have survived 
nearly till the Eevolution, and relate various stories of the mise- 
ries of his protracted old age ; when the fact is, that he died in 
1668, at the age of fifty-three. 



Cleveland. 

But, of all the cavalier poets, the one who did his cause the 
heartiest and stoutest service, and who, notwithstanding much 
carelessness or ruggedness of execution, possessed perhaps, even 
considered simply as a poet, the richest and most various faculty, 
was Jolin Cleveland, the most popular verse-writer of his own 
da}^ the most neglected of all his contemporaries ever since. 
Cleveland was the eldest son of the Eev. Thomas Cleveland, 
vicar of Hinckley and rector of Stoke, in Leicestershire, and he 
was born at Loughborough in that county in 1613. Down to 
the breaking out of the civil war, he resided at St. John's College, 
Cambridge, of which he was a Fellow, and seems to have distin- 
guislied himself principally by his Latin poetry. But, when every 
man took his side, with whatever weapons he could wield, for king 
or parliament, Anthony Wood tells us that Cleveland was the first 
writer who came forth as a champion of the royal cause in Eng- 
lish verse. To that cause he adhered till its ruin ; at last in 
1655, after having led for some years a fugitive life, he was 
caught and thrown into prison at Yarmouth,; but, after a de- 
tention of a few months, Cromwell, on his petition, allowed him 
to go at large. The transaction was honourable to both parties. 
Cleveland is commonly regarded as a mere dealer in satire and 
invective, and as having no higher qualities than a somewhat 
rude force and vehemence. His prevailing fault is a straining 
after vigour and concentration of expression; and few of his 
pieces are free from a good deal of obscurity, harshness, or other 
disfigurement, occasioned by this habit or tendency, working in 
association with an alert, ingenious, and fertile fancy, a neglect 
of and apparently a contempt for neatness of finish, and the turn 
for quaintness and quibbling characteristic of the school to which 



290 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

he belongs — for Cleveland must be considered as essentially one 
of the old wit poets. Most of his poems seem to have been 
thrown off in haste, and never to have been afterwards corrected 
or revised. There are, however, among them some that are not 
without vivacity and sprightliness ; and others of his more 
solemn verses have considerable digTiity. 

The following epitaph on Ben Jonson is the shortest and 
best of several tributes to the memory of that poet, with whose 
masculine genius that of Cleveland seems to have strongly sym- 
pathised : — 

The Muses' fairest Kght in no dark time ; 
The wonder of a learned age ; the line 
Which none can pass ; the most proportioned wit 
To nature ; the best judge of what was fit ; 
The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen ; 
The voice most echoed by consenting men ; 
The soul which answered best to all well said 
By others, and which most requital made ; 
Tuned to the highest key of ancient Kome, 
Eeturning all her music with his own ; 
In whom with Nature Study claimed a part, 
Yet who unto himself owed all his art ; 
Here lies Ben Jonson : every age will look 
With sorrow here, with wonder on his book. 

Elsewhere he thus expresses his preference for Jonson, as a 
dramatist, over the greatest of his contemporaries : — 

Shakespeare may make griefs, merry Beaumont's style 

Eavish and melt anger into a smile ; 

In winter nights or after meals they be, 

I must confess, very good company ; 

But thou exact' st our best hom's' industry ; 

We may read them, we ought to study thee ; 

Thy scenes are precepts ; every verse doth give 

Counsel, and teach us, not to laugh, but live. 



Wither. 

These last-mentioned writers — Carew, Lovelace, Suckling, 
Denham, and Cleveland — were all, as we have seen, cavaliers ; 
but the cause of puritanism and the parliament had also its poets 
as well as that of love and loyalty. Of these the two most emi- 
nent were Marvel and Wither. Marvel's era, however, is rather 
after the Eestoration. George Wither, who was bom in 1588, 
covers nearly seventy years of the seventeenth century with his 
life, and not very far from sixty with his works : his first publi- 



WITHER. 291 

cation, his volume of satires entitled Abuses Stript and AVhipt, 
having appeared in 1611, and some of his last pieces only a short 
time before his death in 1667. The entire number of his separate 
works, as they have been reckoned up by modern bibliographers, 
exceeds a hundred. 

One excellence for which all Wither's writings are eminent, 
his prose as well as his verse, is their genuine English. His 
unaifected diction, even now, has scarcely a stain of age upon it, 
— but flows on, ever fresh and transparent, like a pebbled rill. 

Down to the breaking out of the war between the king and 
the parliament. Wither, although his pious poetry made him 
a favourite with the puritans, had always professed himself a 
strong church and state man ; even at so late a date as in 1639, 
when he was above fifty, he served as a captain of horse in the 
expedition against the Scotch Covenanters ; and when two or thi'ee 
years after he took arms on the other side, he had yet his new 
principles in a great measure to seek or make. It appears not 
to have been till a considerable time after this that his old ad- 
miration of the monarchy and the hierarchy became suddenly 
converted into the conviction that both one and other were, 
and had been all along, only public nuisances — the fountains of 
all the misrule and misery of the nation. What mainly in- 
stigated him to throw himself into the commencing contest with 
such eagerness seems to have been simply the notion, which 
possessed and tormented him all his life, that he was born with 
a peculiar genius for public affairs, and that things had very 
little chance of going right unless he were employed. With his 
head full of this conceit, it mattered comparatively little on 
which side he took his stand to begin with : he would speedily 
make all even and right; the one thing needful in the first 
instance was, that his services should be taken advantage of. 
Of course, Wither's opinions, like those of other men, were in- 
fluenced by his position, and he was no doubt perfectly sincere 
in the most extreme of the new principles which he was ulti- 
mately led to profess. The defect of men of his temper is not 
insincerity. But they are nevertheless apt to be almost as 
unstable as if they had no strong convictions at all. Their con- 
victions, in truth, however strong, do not rest so much upon 
reason or principle, as upon mere passion. They see everything 
through so thick and deeply coloured an atmosphere of self, 
that its real shape goes for very little in their conception of it ; 
change only the hue of the haze, or the halo, with which it is 
thus invested, and you altogether change to them the thing 
itself — making the white appear black, the bright dim, the 



292 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

round square, or the reverse. Wither, with all his ardour and 
real honesty, appears never in fact to have acquired any credit 
for reliability, or steadiness in the opinions he held, either from 
friends or opponents. He very naively lets out this himself in 
a prose pamphlet which he published in 1624, entitled The 
Scholar's Purgatory, being a vindication of himself addressed to 
the Bishops, in which, after stating that he had been offered 
more money and better entertainment if he would have em- 
ployed himself in setting forth heretical fancies than he had 
any chance of ever obtaining by the profession of the truth, he 
adds, " Yea, sometimes I have been wooed to the profession of 
their wild and ill-grounded opinions by the sectaries of so many 
several separations, that, had I liked, or rather had not God 
been the more merciful to me, I might have been Lieutenant, if 
not Captain, of some new band of such volunteers long ere this 
time." Overtures of this kind are, of course, only made to persons 
who are believed to be open to them. It is plain from his own 
account that Wither was thus early notorious as a speculator or 
trader in such securities — as one ready, not precisely to sell him- 
self, his opinions, and his conscience, to the highest bidder, but 
yet to be gained over if the offer were only made large enough to 
convert as well as purchase him. There is a great deal of very 
passable wearing and working honesty of this kind in the world. 
The history of Wither's numerous publications has been 
elaborately investigated by the late Mr. Park in the first and 
second volumes of the British Bibliographer ; many of his 
poems have been reprinted by Sir Egerton Brydges, and- others 
of his admirers ; and an ample account of his life and writings, 
drawn up with a large and intimate knowledge, as well as 
affectionate zeal and painstaking, which make it supersede what- 
ever had been previously written on the subject, forms the prin- 
cipal article (extending over more than 130 pages) of Mr. 
Wilmott's Lives of Sacred Poets (8vo. Lon. 1834). Much 
injustice, however, has been done to Wither by the hasty judg- 
ment that has commonly been passed, even by his greatest 
admirers, uj^on his later political poetry, as if it consisted of mere 
party invective and fury, and all that he had written of any 
enduring value or interest was to be found in the productions 
of the early part of his life. Some at least of his political pieces 
are very remarkable for their vigour and terseness. As a speci- 
men we will give a portion of a poem which he published 
without his name in 1647, under the title of " Amygdala Bri- 
tannica ; Almonds for Parrots ; a dish of Stone-fruit, partly 
shelled and partly unshelled; which, if cracked, picked, and 



WITHER. 293 

well digested, may be wholesome against "lose epidemic dis- 
tempers of the brain now predominant, and >revent some malig- 
nant diseases likely to ensue: composed l.eretofore by a well- 
known modern author, and now published according to a copy 
found written with his own hand. Qui bene latuit bene vixit.''^ This 
fantastic title-page (with the manufacture of w4ii(;h the book- 
seller may have had more to do than Wither himself) was suited 
to the popular taste of the day, but would little lead a modern 
reader to expect the nervous concentration and passionate ear- 
nestness of such verses as the following : — 

The time draws near, and hasteth on, 
In which strange works shall be begim ; 
And prosecutions, whereon shall 
Depend much future bliss or bale. 
If to the left hand you decline. 
Assured destruction they divine ; 
But, if the right-hand course ye take, 
This island it will happy make. 

A time draws nigh in which you may 
As you shall please the chess-men play ; 
Eemove, confine, check, leave, or take. 
Dispose, depose, undo, or make, 
Pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, or king, 
And act your wills in every thing : 
But, if that time let slip you shall, 
For yesterday in vain you call. 

A time draws nigh in which the sun 
Will give more light than he hath done : 
Then also you shall see the moon 
Shine brighter than the sun at noon ; 
And many stars now seeming dull 
Give shadows like the moon at full. 
Yet then shall some, who think they see, 
Wrapt in Egyptian darkness be. 

A time draws nigh when with your blood 
You shall preserve the viper's brood, 
And starve your own ; yet fancy than ^ 
That you have played the pelican ; 
But, when you think the frozen snakes 
Have changed their natures for your sakes, 
They, in requital, will contrive 
Your mischief who did them revive. 

A time will come when they that wake 
Shall dream ; and sleepers undertake 

I Then. 



294 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

The grand affairs ; yet,^ few men know 
Which, are the dreamers of these two • 
And fewer care by which of these 
They guided be, so they have ease ; 
But an alarum shall advance 
Your drowsy spirits from that trance. 

A time shall come ere long in which 
Mere beggars shall grow soonest rich ; 
The rich with wants be pinched more 
Than such as go from door to door ; 
The honourable by the base 
Shall be despited to their face ; 
The truth defamed be with lies ; 
The fool prefeiTed before the wise ; 
And he that fighteth to be free, 
By conquering enslaved shah be. 

A time will come when see you shall 
Toads fly aloft and eagles crawl ; 
Wolves walk abroad in human shapes ; 
Men turn to asses, hogs, and apes : 
But, when that cursed time is come, 
Well 's he that is both deaf and du.mb ; 
That nothing speaketh, notliing hears, 
And neither hopes, desires, nor fears. 

When men shall generally confess 
Their folly and their wickedness ; 
Yet act as if there neither were 
Among them conscience, wit, or fear ; 
When they shall talk as if they had 
Some brains, yet do as they were mad ; 
And nor by reason, nor by noise, 
By human or by heavenly voice, 
By being praised or reproved. 
By judgments or by mercies, moved : 
Then look for so much sword and fire 
As such a temper doth require. 

Ere God his wrath on Balaam wreaks, 
First by his ass to him he speaks ; 
Then shows him in an angel's hand 
A sword, his courses to withstand ; 
But, seeing still he forward went, 
Quite through his heart a sword he sent. 



^ As yet. 



WITHER. 295 

And God will thus, if thus they do, 
Still deal with kings, and subjects too ; 
That, where his grace despised is grown, 
He by his judgments may be known. 

Neither Clmrchliill nor Cowper ever wrote anything in the 
same style better than this. The modern air, too, of the whole, 
with the exception of a few words, is wonderful. But this, as 
we have said, is the character of all Wither's poetry — of his 
earliest as well as of his latest. It is nowhere more conspicuous 
than in his early religions verses, especially in his collection 
entitled Songs and Hymns of the Church, first published in 
1624. There is nothing of the kind in the language more 
perfectly beautiful than some of these. We subjoin two of 
them : — 

Thanksgiving for Seasonable Weather, Song 85. 

Lord, should the sun, the ctouds, the wind, 

The air, and seasons be 
To us so froward and unkind 

As we are false to thee ; 
All fruits would quite away be burned, 

Or lie in water drowned, 
Or blasted be or overturned, 

Or chilled on the ground. 

But from our duty though we swerve, 

Thou still dost mercy show. 
And deign thy creatures to preserve, 

That men might thankful grow : 
Yea, though from day to day we sin, 

And thy displeasure gain, 
No sooner we to cry begin 

But pity we obtain. 

The weather now thou changed hast 

That put us late to fear, 
And when our hopes were almost past 

Then comfort did appear. 
The heaven the earth's complaints hath heard ; 

They reconciled be ; 
And thou such weather hast prepared 

As we desired of thee. 

For which, with lifted hands and eyes, 

To thee we do repay 
The due and willing sacrifice 

Of giving thanks to-day ; 
Because such offerings we should not 

To render thee be slow, 
Nor let that mercy be forgot 

Which thou art pleased to show. 



296 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Tlianksgiving for Victory. Song 88, 

We love thee, Lord, we praise thy name, 

Who, "by thy great almighty arm, 
Hast kept us from the spoil and shame 

Of those that sought our causeless harm : 
Thou art our life, our triumph-song, 

The joy and comfort of our heart ; 
To thee all praises do belong. 

And thou the God of Armies art. 

We must confess it is thy power 

That made us masters of the field ; 
Thou art our bulwark and our tower. 

Our rock of refuge and our shield : 
Thou taught'st our hands and arms to fight ; 

With vigour thou didst gird us round ; 
Thou mad'st our foes to take their flight. 

And thou didst beat them to the ground. 

With fury came our armed foes, 

To blood and slaughter fiercely bent ; 
And perils round did us inclose. 

By whatsoever way we went ; 
That, hadst not thou our Captain been. 

To lead as on, and off again. 
We on the place had dead been seen. 

Or masked in blood and wounds had lain. 

This song we therefore sing to thee. 

And pray that thou for evermore 
Would'st our Protector deign to be. 

As at this time and heretofore ; 
That thy continual favour shown 

May cause us more to thee incline, 
And make it through the world be known 

That such as are our foes are thine. 



Beowne. 

Along with. Wither ought to be mentioned a contemporarj 
poet of a genius, or at least of a manner, in some respects 
kindred to his, and whose fate it has been to experience the 
same long neglect, William Browne, the author of Britannia's 
Pastorals, of which, the first part was published in 1613, the 
second in 1616, and of The Shepherd's Pipe in Seven Eclogues, 
which appeared in 1614, Browne was a native of Tavistock in 
Devonshire, where he was born in 1590, and be is supposed to 
have died in 1645. It is remarkable that, if he lived to so late 



CHARLES I. 297 

a date, lie should not have written more than he appears to have 
done : the two parts of his Britannia's Pastorals were reprinted 
together in 1625 ; and a piece called The Inner Temple Masque, 
and a few short poems, were published for the first time in an 
edition of his works brought out, under the care of Dr. Farmer, 
in 1772 ; but the last thirty years of his life would seem, in so 
far as regards original production, to have been a blank. Yet 
a remarkable characteristic of his style, as well as of Wither's, 
is its ease and fluency ; and it would appear, from what he says 
in one of the songs of his Pastorals, that he had written part of 
that work before he was twenty. His poetry certainly does not 
read as if its fountain would be apt soon to run dry. His facility 
of rhyming and command of harmonious expression are very 
great ; and, within their proper sphere, his invention and fancy 
are also extremely active and fertile. His strength, however, 
lies chiefly in description, not the thing for which poetry or 
language is best fitted, and a species of writing which cannot be 
carried on long without becoming tiresome ; he is also an elegant 
didactic declaimer; but of passion, or indeed of any breath of 
actual living humanity, his poetry has almost none. This, no 
doubt, was the cause of the neglect into which after a short 
time it was allowed to drop ; and this limited qualit}^ of his 
genius may also very probably have been the reason why he 
so soon ceased to write and publish. From the time when 
religious and political contention began to wax high, in the 
latter years of King James, such poetry as Browne's had little 
chance of acceptance : from about that date Wither, as we have 
seen, who also had previously written his Shepherd's Hunting, 
and other similar pieces, took up a new strain ; and Browne, if 
he was to continue to be listened to, must have done the same, 
which he either would not or could not. Yet, although without 
the versatility of Wither, and also with less vitality than Wither 
even in the kind of poetry which is common to the two, Browne 
rivals that writer both in the abundance of his poetic vein and 
the sweetness of his verse ; and the English of the one has 
nearly all the purity, perspicuity, and unfading freshness of 
style which is so remarkable in the other. 



Prose Writers : — Charles I. 

Most of the prose that was written and published in England 
in the middle portion of the seventeenth century, or the twenty 
years preceding the Eestoration, was political and theological, 



298 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

but very little of it has any claim to be considered as belonging 
to the national literature. A torrent of pamphlets and ephemeral 
polemics supplied the ravenous public appetite with a mental 
sustenance which answered the wants of the moment, much as 
the bakers' ovens did with daily bread for the body. It was all 
devoured, and meant to be devoured, as fast as it was produced 
— devoured in the sense of being quite used up and consumed, 
so far as any good was to be got out of it. It was in no respect 
intended for posterity, any more than the linen and broad-cloth 
then manufactured were intended for posterity. Still even this 
busy and excited time produced some literary performances 
which still retain more or less of interest. 

The writings attributed to Charles I. were first collected and 
published at the Hague soon after his death, in a folio volume 
without date, under the title of Eeliquige Sacree Carolinae, and 
twice afterwards in England, namely, in 1660 and 1687, with 
the title of BASIAIECA : The Works of King Charles the Martyr. 
If we except a number of speeches to the parliament, letters, 
despatches, and other political papers, the contents of this col- 
lection are all theological, consisting of prayers, arguments, and 
disquisitions on the controversy about church government, and 
the famous Eikon Basilike, or. The Portraiture of his Sacred 
Majesty in his Solitude and Sufferings ; which, having been 
printed under the care of Dr. Gauden (after the Eestoration 
successively bishop of Exeter and Worcester), had been first 
published by itself immediately'' after the king's execution. It 
is now generally admitted that the Eikon was really written by 
Gauden, who, after the Eestoration, openly claimed it as his 
own, Mr. Hallam, however, although he has no doubt of Gauden 
being the author, admits that it is, nevertheless, superior to his 
acknowledged writings. " A strain of majestic melancholy," he 
observes, " is well kept up ; but the personated sovereign is 
rather too theatrical for real nature ; the language is too rhe- 
torical and amplified, the periods too artificially elaborated. 
None but scholars and practised writers employ such a style as 
this." * It is not improbable that the work may have been 
submitted to Charles's revisal, and that it may have received 
both his approval and his corrections. Charles, indeed, was 
more in the habit of correcting what had been written by others 
than of writing anything himself. " Though he was of as slow . 
a pen as of speech," says Sir Philip Warwick, " yet both were 
very significant ; and he had that modest esteem of his own 
parts, that he would usually say, he would willingly make his 
* Lit. of Eur. iii. 376. 



MILTON'S PROSE WORKS. 299 

own despatches, bnt that he found it better to be a cobbler tha n 
a shoemaker. I have been in company with very learned men, 
when I have brought them their own papers back from him with 
his alterations, who ever confessed his amendments to have been 
very material. And I once, by his commandment, brought him 
a paper of my own to read, to see whether it was suitable to his 
directions, and he disallowed it slightingly: I desired him I 
might call Dr. Sanderson to aid me, and that the doctor might 
understand his own meaning from himself; and, with his 
majesty's leave, I brought him whilst he was walking and 
taking the air ; whereupon we two went back ; but pleased him 
as little when we returned it: for, smilingly, he said, a man 
might have as good ware out of a chandler's shop ; but afterwards 
he set it down with his own pen very plainly, and suitably to 
his own intentions." The most important of the literary pro- 
ductions which are admitted to be wholly Charles's own, are his 
papers in the controversy which he carried on at Newcastle in 
June and July, 1646, with Alexander Henderson, the Scotch 
clergyman, on the question between episcopacy and presbytery, 
and those on the same subject in his controversy with the par- 
liamentary divines at Newport in October, 1648. These papers 
show considerable clearness of thinking and logical or argu- 
mentative talent ; but it cannot be said that they are written 
with any force or elegance. 



Milton's Prose Works. 



We have already mentioned Bishop Hall, both as a poet and 
as a writer of prose. A part which Hall took in his old age in 
the grand controversy of the time brought him into collision 
with one with whose name in after ages the world was to 
resound. John Milton, then in his thirty-third year, and re- 
cently returned from his travels in France and Italy, had 
already, in 1641, lent the aid of his pen to the war of the 
Puritans against the established church by the publication of 
his treatise entitled Of Reformation, in Two Books. The same 
year Hall published his Humble Eemonstrance in favour of 
Episcopacy ; which immediately called forth an Answer by 
Smectymnuus, — a word formed from the initial letters of the 
names of five Puritan ministers by whom the tract was written 
— Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew 
Newcomen, and William (or, as he was on this occasion reduced 
to designate himself, Uuilliam) Spurstow. The Answer pro- 



300 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

duced a Confutation by Ardibishop Usher ; and to this Milton 
replied in a treatise entitled Of Prelatical Episcopacy. Hall 
then published a Defence of the Humble Eemonstrance ; and 
Milton wrote Animadversions upon that. About the same time 
he also brought out a performance of much greater pretension, 
under the title of The Eeason of Church Government urged 
against Prelaty, in Two Books. This is the work containing 
the magnificent passage in which he makes the announcement 
of his intention to attempt something in one of the highest kinds 
of poetry " in the mother-tongue," long afterwards accomplished 
in his great epic. Meanwhile a Confutation of the Animadver- 
sions having been published by Bishop Hall, or his son, Milton 
replied, in 1642, in an Apology for Smectymnuus, which was the 
last of his publications in this particular controversy. But, 
nearly all his other prose writings were given to the world 
within the period with which we are now engaged : — namely, 
his Tractate of Education, addressed to his friend Hartlib, and 
his noble Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing, in 1644; his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and 
his Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce, the same 
year; his Tetrachordon, and Colasterion (both on the same 
subject) in 1645; his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, his 
Eikonoclastes, in answer to the Eikon Basilike, and one or two 
other tracts of more temporary interest, all after the execution 
of the king, in 1649 ; his Defence for the People of England, in 
answer to Salmasius (in Latin), in 1651 ; his Second Defence 
(also in Latin), in reply to a work by Peter du Moulin, in 1654 ; 
two additional Latin tracts in reply to rejoinders of Du Moulin, 
in 1655 ; his treatises on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Cases, 
and on The Means of Eemoving Hirelings out of the Church, in 
1659 ; his Letter concerning the Euptures of the Common- 
wealth, and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, the 
same year ; and, finally, his Eeady and Easy Way to establish 
a Free Commonwealth, and his Brief Notes upon a Sermon 
preached by Dr. Griffith, called The Fear of God and the King, 
in the spring of 1660, immediately before the king's return. 
Passages of great poetic splendour occur in some of these pro- 
ductions, and a fervid and fiery spirit breathes in all of them, 
though the animation is as apt to take the tone of mere coarse 
objurgation and abuse as of lofty and dignified scorn or of 
vigorous argument ; but, upon the whole, it cannot be said that 
Milton's English prose is a good style. It is in the first place, 
not perhaps in vocabulary, but certainly in genius and construc- 
tion, the most Latinized of English styles ; but it does not 



HALES; CHILLINGWORTH. 301 

merit the commendation bestowed by Pope on another style 
which he conceived to be formed after the model of the Eoman 
eloquence, of being " so Latin, yet so English all the while." 
It is both soul and body Latin, only in an English dress. 
Owing partly to this principle of composition upon which he 
deliberately proceeded, or to the adoption of which his educa- 
tion and tastes or habits led him, partly to the character of his 
mind, fervid, gorgeous, and soaring, but having little involun- 
tary impulsiveness or self-abandonment, rich as his style often 
is, it never moves with any degree of rapidity or easy grace even 
in passages where such qualities are most required, but has 
at all times something of a stiff, cumbrous, oppressive air, as 
if every thought, the lightest and most evanescent as well as 
the gravest and stateliest, were attired in brocade and whale- 
bone. There is too little relief from constant straining and 
striving; too little repose and variety; in short, too little 
nature. Many things, no doubt, are happily said; there is 
much strong and also some brilliant expression ; but even such, 
imbedded gems do not occur so often as might be looked for 
from so poetical a mind. In fine, we must admit the truth of 
what he has himself confessed — that he was not naturally 
disposed to "this manner of writing;" "wherein," he adds, 
" knowing myself inferior to m^^seif, led by the genial power of 
nature to another task, I have the use, as 1 may account it, but 
of my left hand." * With all his quick susceptibility for what- 
ever was beautiful and bright, Milton seems to have needed 
the soothing influences of the regularity and music of verse 
fully to bring out his poetry, or to sublimate his imagination to 
the true poetical state. The passion which is an enlivening 
flame in his verse half suffocates him with its smoke in his 
prose. 



Hales ; Chillingworth. 



Two other eminent names of theological controversialists 
belonging to this troubled age of the English church may be 
mentioned together — those of John Hales and William Chilling- 
worth. Hales, who was born in 1584, and died in 1656, the 
same year with Hall and Usher, published in his lifetime a few 
short tracts, of which the most important is a Discourse on 
Schism, which was printed in 1642, and is considered to have 
been one of the works that led the way in that bold revolt 

* Eeason of Cliurch Government, Book II. 



302 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

against tlie authority of the fathers, so much cried up by the 
preceding school of Andrews and Laud, upon which has since 
been founded what many hold to be the strongest defence of 
the Church of England against that of Eome. All Hales's 
writings were collected and published after his death, in 1659, 
in a quarto volume, bearing the title of Golden Eemains of the 
Ever-Memorable Mr. John Hales, — a designation which has 
stuck to his name. The main idea of his treatise on Schism had, 
however, been much more elaborately worked out by his friend 
Chillingworth — the Immortal Chillingworth, as he is styled by 
his admirers — in his famous work entitled The Eeligion of 
Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, published in 1637. This 
is one of the most closely and keenly argued polemical treatises 
ever written: the style in which Chillingworth presses his 
reasoning home is like a charge with the bayonet. He was still 
only in his early manhood when he produced this remarkably 
able work ; and he died in 1644 at the age of forty-two. 



Jeremy Taylor. 



But the greatest name by far among the English divines of the 
middle of the seventeenth century is that of Jeremy Taylor. 
He was born in 1613, and died bishop of Down and Connor in 
1667 ; but most of his works were written, and many of them 
were also published, before the Kestoration. In abundance of 
thought ; in ingenuity of argument ; in opulence of imagination ; 
in a soul made alike for the feeling of the sublime, of the beau- 
tiful, and of the picturesque ; and in a style, answering in its 
compass, j&exibility, and sweetness to the demands of all these 
powers, Taylor is unrivalled among the masters of English 
eloquence. He is the Spenser of our prose writers; and his 
prose is sometimes almost as musical as Spenser's verse. His 
Sermons, his Golden Grove, his Holy Living, and, still more, 
his Holy Dying, all contain many passages, the beauty and 
splendour of which are hardly to be matched in any other 
English prose writer. Another of his most remarkable woiks, 
Theologia Eclectica, a Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, 
first published in 1647, may be placed beside Milton's Areopa- 
gitica, published three years before, as doing for liberty of con- 
science the same service which that did for the liberty of the 
press. Both remain the most eloquent and comprehensive 
defences we yet possess of these two great rights. 



303 

Fuller. 

The last of tlie theological writers of this era that we shall 
notice is Fuller. Dr. Thomas Fuller was horn in 1604, and died 
in 1661 ; and in the course of his not very extended life produced 
a considerable number of literary works, of which his Church 
History of Britain from the Birth of Jesus Christ until the Year 
1648, which appeared in 1656, and his History of the Worthies 
of England, which was not published till the year after his death, 
are the most important. He is a most singular writer, full of 
verbal quibbling and quaintness of all kinds, but by far the most 
amusing and engaging of all the rhetoricians of this school, 
inasmuch as his conceits are rarely mere elaborate feats of in- 
genuity, but are usually informed either by a strong spirit of 
very peculiar humour and drollery, or sometimes even by a 
warmth and depth of feeling, of which too, strange as it may 
appear, the oddity of his phraseology is often a not ineffective 
exponent. He was certainly one of the greatest and truest wits 
that ever lived : he is witty not by any sort of eifort at all, but 
as it were in spite of himself, or because he cannot help it. But 
wit, or the faculty of looking at and presenting things in their 
less obvious relations, is accompanied in him, not only by 
humour and heart, but by a considerable endowment of the irra- 
diating power of fancy. Accordingly, what he writes is always 
lively and interesting, and sometimes even eloquent and poetical, 
though the eccentricities of his characteristic manner are not 
favourable, it must be confessed, to dignity or solemnity of style 
when attempted to be long sustained. Fuller, and it is no 
wonder, was one of the most popular writers, if not the most 
popular, of his own day: he observes himself^ in the opening 
chapter of his Worthies, that hitherto no stationer (or publisher) 
had lost by him ; and what happened in regard to one of his 
works, his Holy State, is perhaps without example in the history 
of book-publishing : — it appeared originally in a folio volume in 
1642, and is believed to have been four times reprinted before 
the Eestoration ; but the publisher continued to describe the 
two last impressions on the title-page as still only the third 
edition, as if the demand had been so great that he felt (for what- 
ever reason) unwilling that its extent should be known. It is 
conjectured that his motive probably was " a desire to lull sus- 
picion, and not to invite prohibition from the ruling powers."* 

* Preface by the Editor, Mr. James Nichols, to The Holy State. 8vo. Lon. 
1841. 



304 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Hardly anything can be found in Fuller that is dull or weari- 
some. The following interesting passage, often referred to, 
makes part of the account of Warwickshire in the Worthies : — 

William Shakespeare was born at Stratford on Avon in this county ; in 
whom three eminent poets may seem in some sort to be compounded : 
1. Martial, in the warlike sound of his surname (whence some may con- 
jecture him of a military extraction), Hastivibrans, or Shakespeare. 2. 
Ovid, the most natural and witty of all poets ; and hence it was that Queen 
Elizabeth, coming into a grammar-school, made this extemporary verse, 
" Persius a Crabstaff, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine wag." 

3. Plautus, who was an exact comedian, yet never any scholar ; as our 
Shakespeare, if alive, would confess himself. Add to all these, that, 
though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet 
he could, when so disposed, be solemn and serious, as appears by his 
tragedies ; so that Heraclitus himself (I mean if secret and unseen) might 
afford to smile at his comedies, they were so merry ; and Democritus 
scarce forbear to sigh at his tragedies, they were so mournful. 

He was an eminent instance of the truth of that rule, Poeta non fit, sed 
nascitur ; one is not made, but born a poet. Indeed his learning was very 
little, so that, as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but 
are pointed, and smoothed even, as they are taken out of the earth, so 
nature itself was all the art which was used upon him. 

Many were the wit combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson. TSHiich two 
I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master 
Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning ; solid, but slow, 
in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in 
bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take 
advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. He 
died anno Domini 16 . . , and was buried at Stratford upon Avon, the 
town of his nativity. 

We may add another Warmckshire worthy, of a different 
order : — 

Philemon Holland, where born is to me unknown, was bred in Trinity 
College in Cambridge a Doctor in Physic, and fixed himself in Coventry, 
He was the translator general in his age, so that those books alone of his 
turning into English will make a country gentleman a competent Hbrary 
for historians ; in so much that one saith, 

" Ilolland with his translations doth so fill us, 
He will not let Suetonius be Tranquillus." 

Indeed, some decry all translators as interlopers, spoiling the trade of 
learning, which should be driven amongst scholars alone. Such also allege 
that the best translations are works rather of industry than judgment, and, 
in easy authors, of faithfulness rather than industry ; that many be but 
bunglers, forcing the meaning of the authors they translate, " forcing the 
lock when they cannot open it." 



FULLER. 305 

But their opinion resents too much of envy, that such gentlemen who 
cannot repair to the fountain should be debarred access to the stream. 
Besides, it is unjust to charge all with the faults of some; and a distinction 
must be made amongst translators betwixt cobblers and workmen, and our 
Holland had the true knack of translating. 

Many of these his books he wrote with one pen, whereon he himself 
thus pleasantly versified : — 

" With one sole pen I writ this book, 
Made of a grey goose quill ; 
A pen it was when it I took, 
And a pen I leave it still." 

This monumental pen he solemnly kept, and showed to my reverend 
tutor. Doctor Samuel Ward. It seems he leaned very lightly on the neb 
thereof, though weightily enough in another sense, performing not slightly 
but solidly what he undertook. 

But what commendeth him most to the praise of posterity is his 
translating Camden's Britanjaia, a translation more than a translation, with 
many excellent additions not found in the Latin, done fifty years since in 
Master Camden's lifetime, not only with his knowledge and consent, but 
also, no doubt, by his desire and help. Yet such additions (discoverable 
in the former part with asterisks in the margent) with some antiquaries 
obtain not equal authenticalness with the rest. This eminent translator 
was translated to a better life anno Domini 16 . . . 

The translation of the translator took place in fact in 1636, 
when he had reached the venerable age of eighty-five, so that 
translating would seem to be not an unhealthy occupation. The 
above sketch is Fuller all over, in heart as well as in head and 
hand — the last touch especially, which, jest though it be, and 
upon a solemn subject, falls as gently and kindly as a tear on 
good old Philemon and his labours. The effect is as if we were 
told that even so gently fell the touch of death itself upon the 
ripe old man — even so easy, natural, and smiling, his labours 
over, was his leave-taking and exchange of this earth of many 
languages, the confusion or discord of which he had done his 
best to reduce, for that better world, where there is only one 
tongue, and translation is not needed or known. And Puller's 
wit and jesting are always of this character ; they have not in 
them a particle either of bitterness or of irreverence. No man 
ever (in writing at least) made so many jokes, good, bad, and 
indifferent ; be the subject what it may, it does not matter ; in 
season and out of season he is equally facetious ; he cannot let 
slip an occasion of saying a good thing any more than a man who 
is tripped can keep himself from falling; the habit is as irre- 
sistible with him as the habit of breathing ; and yet there is pro- 
bably neither an ill-natured nor a profane witticism to be found 



306 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

in all that lie lias written. It is the sweetest-blooded wit that 
was ever infused into man or book. And how strong and 
weighty, as well as how gentle and beautiful, much of his writing 
is ! The work perhaps in which he is often est eloquent and 
pathetic is that entitled The Holy State and the Profane State, 
the former great popularity of which we have already noticed. 
Almost no writer whatever tells a story so well as Fuller — with 
so much life and point and gusto. 



Sir Thomas Browne. 



Another of the most original and peculiar writers of the middle 
portion of the seventeenth century is Sir Thomas Browne, the 
celebrated author of the Eeligio Medici, published in 1642 ; the 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common 
Errors, in 1646; and the Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Dis- 
course on the Sepulchral Urns found in Norfolk ; and The 
Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plan- 
tations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Con- 
sidered, which appeared together in 1658. Browne died in 1682, 
at the age of seventy-seven ; but he published nothing after the 
Eestoration, though some additional tracts found among his 
papers were given to the world after his death. The writer of a 
well-known review of Browne's literary productions, and of the 
characteristics of his singular genius, has sketched the history of 
his successive acts of authorship in a lively and striking passage : 
— " He had no sympathy with the great business of men. In 
that awful year when Charles I. went in person to seize five 
members of the Commons' House, — when the streets resounded 
with shouts of ' Privilege of Parliament,' and the king's coach 
was assailed b}^ the prophetic cry, ' To your tents, Israel,' — 
in that year, in fact, when the civil war first broke out, and when 
most men of literary power were drawn by the excitement of the 
crisis into patriotic controversy on either side, — appeared the 
calm and meditative reveiies of the Eeligio Medici. The war 
raged on. It was a struggle between all the elements of govern- 
ment. England was torn by convulsion and red with blood. 
But Browne was tranquilly preparing his Pseudodoxia Epidemica : 
as if errors about basilisks and griffins were the paramount and 
fatal epidemic of the time ; and it was published in due order in 
that year when the cause which the author advocated, as far as 
he could advocate anything political, lay at its last gasp. The 
kincc dies on the scaffold. The Protectorate succeeds. Men are 



SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 307 

again fighting on paper the solemn cause already decided in the 
field. Drawn from visions more sublime, — forsaking studies 
more intricate and vast than those of the poetical Sage of 
Korwich, — diverging from a career bounded by the most splendid 
goal, — foremost in the ranks shines the flaming sword of Milton : 
Sir Thomas Browne is lost in the quincunx of tho ancient 
gardens; and the year 1658 beheld the death of Oliver Crom- 
well, and the publication of the Plydriotaphia."* The writings of 
Sir Thomas Browne, to be relished or rightly appreciated, must 
of course be read in the spirit suited to the species of literature 
to which they belong. If we look for matter-of-fact information 
in a poem, we are likely to be disappointed ; and so are we like- 
wise, if we go for the passionate or pictured style of poetry to an 
encyclopaedia. Browne's works, with all their varied learning, 
contain very little positive information that can now be accounted 
of much value ; very little even of direct moral or economical 
counsel by which any person could greatly profit ; very little, in 
short, of anything that will either put money in a man's pocket, 
or actual knowledge in his head. Assuredly the interest with 
which they were perused, and the charm that was found to 
belong to them, could not at any time have been due, except in 
very small part indeed, to the estimation in which their readers 
held such pieces of intelligence as that the phoenix is but a fable 
of the poets, and that the griffin exists only in the zoology of the 
heralds. It would fare ill with Browne if the worth of his books 
were to be tried by the amoimt of what they contain of this kind 
of information, or, indeed, of any other kind of what is commonly 
called useful knowledge ; for, in truth, he has done his best to 
diffuse a good many vulgar errors as monstrous as any he had 
corrected. For that matter, if his readers were to continue to 
believe with him in astrology and witchci'aft, we shall all agree 
that it was of very little consequence what faith they may hold 
touching the phoenix and the griffin. Mr. Hallam, we think, has, 
in a manner which is not usual with him, fallen somewhat into 
this error of applying a false test in the judgment he has passed 
upon Browne It is, no doubt, quite true that the Inquiry into 
Vulgar Errors " scarcely raises a high notion of Browne himself 
as a philosopher, or of the state of physical knowledge in 
England •,''-\ that the Eeligio Medici shows its author to have 
been " far removed from real philosophy, both by his turn of 
mind and by the nature of his erudition;" and likewise that 

* Article in Edinburgh Keview for October, 1836 ; No. 129, p. 34. (Under- 
stood to be by Sir Edwurd liuiwer Lytton.) 
t Lit, of Eiir. ill. 461. 



308 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

" he seldom reasons," that " his thoughts are desultory," that 
" sometimes he appears sceptical or paradoxical," but that " cre- 
dulity and deference to authority prevail" in his habits of 
thinking.* Understanding philosophy in the sense in which the 
term is here used, that is to say, as meaning tbe sifting and 
separation of fact from fiction, it may be admitted that there is 
not much of that in Sir Thomas Browne ; his works are all 
rather marked by a very curious and piquant intermixture of the 
two. Of course, such being the case, what he writes is not to be 
considered solely or even principally with reference to its ab- 
solute truth or falsehood, but rather with reference to its relative 
truth and significance as an expression of some feeling or notion 
or other idiosyncracy of the very singular and interesting mind 
from which it has proceeded. Eead in this spirit, the works of 
Sir Thomas Browne, more especially his Eeligio Medici, and his 
Urn Burial, will be found among the richest in our literature — 
full of uncommon thoughts, and trains of meditation leading far 
away into the dimmest inner chambers of life and death — and 
also of an eloquence, sometimes fantastic, but always striking, 
not seldom pathetic, and in its greatest passages gorgeous with 
the emblazonry of a warm imagination. Out of such a writer 
the rightly attuned and sympathizing mind will draw many 
things more precious than any mere facts. 



Sir James Haerington. 



We can merely mention Sir James Harrington's political 
romance entitled Oceana, which was published in 1656. Har- 
rington's leading principles are, that the natural element of power 
in states is property ; and that, of all kinds of property, that in 
land is the most important, possessing, indeed, certain charac- 
teristics which distinguish it, in its natural and political action, 
from all other property. " In general," observes Mr. Hallam, 
" it may be said of Harrington that he is prolix, dull, pedantic, 
yet seldom profound ; but sometimes redeems himself by just 
observations. "t This is true in so far as respects the style of 
the Oceana ; but it hardly does justice to the ingenuity, the 
truth, and the importance of certain of Harrington's views and 
deductions in the philosophy of politics. If he has not the merit 
of absolute originality in his main propositions, they had at least 
never been so clearly expounded and demonstrated by any 
preceding writer. 

* Lit. of Eur. iii. 153. t Id. iv. 200. 



309 



Newspapers. 

It has now been satisfactorily shown that the three news- 
papers, entitled The English Mercurie, Nos. 50, 51, and 54, 
preserved among Dr. Birch's historical collections in the British 
Museum, professing to be " published by authority, for the 
contradiction of false reports," at the time of the attack of the 
Spanish Armada, on the credit of which the invention of news- 
papers used to be attributed to Lord Burleigh, are modern 
forgeries, — -jeux ctesprit, in fact, of the reverend Doctor.* Occa- 
sional pamphlets, containing foreign news, began to be pub- 
lished in England towards the close of the reign of James I. 
The earliest that has been met with is entitled News out of 
Holland, dated 1619 ; and other similar papers of news from 
different foreign countries are extant which appeared in 1620, 
1621, and 1622. The first of these news-pamphlets which 
came out at regular intervals appears to have been that entitled 
The News of the Present Week, edited by Nathaniel Butler, 
which was started in 1622, in the early days of the Thirty Years' 
War, and was continued, in conformity with its title, as a weekly 
publication. But the proper era of English newspapers, at least 
of those containing domestic intelligence, commences with the 
Long Parliament. The earliest that has been discovered is a 
quarto pamphlet of a few leaves, entitled The Diurnal Occur- 
rences, or Daily Proceedings of Both Houses, in this great and 
happy parliament, from the 3rd of November, 1640, to the 3rd 
of November, 1641 ; London, printed for William Cooke, and 
are to be sold at his shop at Furnival's Inn Gate, in Holbom, 
1641."]" More than a hundred newspapers, with different titles, 
appear to have been published between this date and the death 
of the king, and upwards of eighty others between that event 
and the Restoration.^ " When hostilities commenced," says the 
writer from whom we derive this information, " every event, 
during a most eventful period, had its own historian, who com- 
municated News from Hull, Truths from York, Warranted Tidings 
from Ireland, and Special Passages from several places. These were 
all occasional papers. Impatient, however, as a distracted 
people were for information, the news were never distributed 
daily. The various newspapers were published weekly at first ; 

* See A Letter to Antonio Panizzi, Esq. By Thomas Watts, of the British 
Museum. 8vo. Lond. 1839. 

t See Chronological List of Newspapers from the Epoch of the Civil Wars, 
in Chahuers's Life of Kuddiman, pp. 404—442. 

X See Chalmers's Life of Ruddiman, p. 114. 



810 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

but in the progress of events, and tlie ardour of curiosity, tliey 
were distributed twice or tbrice in every week.* Such were 
the French Intelligencer, the Dutch Spy, the Irish Mercury, 
and the Scots Dove, the Parliament Kite, and the Secret Owl. 
Mercurius Acheronticus brought them hebdomadal JSI'ews from Bell ; 
Mercurius Democritas communicated wonderful news from the 
World in the Moon; the Laughing Mercury gave peifect news 
from the Antipodes ; and Mercurius Mastix faithfully lashed all 
Scouts, Mercuries, Posts, Spies, and other Intelligencers.""}" 
Besides the newspapers, also, the great political and religious 
questions of the time were debated, as already mentioned, in 
a prodigious multitude of separate pamphlets, which appear 
to have been read quite as universally and as eagerly. Of such 
pamphlets printed in the twenty years from the meeting of the 
Long Parliament to the Eestoration there are still preserved 
in the British Museum, forming the collection called the King's 
Pamphlets, no fewer than thirty thousand, which would give 
a rate of four or five new ones every day. 

Where our modern newspapers begin, the series of our old 
chroniclers closes with Sir Eichard Baker's Chronicle of the 
Kings of England, written while its author was confined for 
debt in the Fleet Prison, where he died in 1645, and first pub^ 
lished in a folio volume in 1641. It was several times reprinted, 
and was a great favourite with our ancestors for two or three 
succeeding generations ; but it has now lost all interest, except 
for a few passages relating to the author's own time. Baker, 
however, himself declares it to be compiled "with so great 
care and diligence, that, if all others were lost, this only will be 
sufficient to inform posterity of all passages memorable or worthy 
to be known." Sir Eichard and his Chronicle are now popularly 
remembered principally as the trusted historical guides and 
authorities of Addison's incomparable Sir Eoger de Coverley.;]: 



Eetrospect of the Commonwealth Literature. 

It thus appears that the age of the Civil "^A^ar and the Com- 
monwealth does not present an absolute blank in the history of 
our highest literature ; but, unless we are to except the Areopa- 

* In December, 1642, however, Spalding, the Aberdeen annalist, in a 
passage which Mr. Chalmers has quoted, tells us that " now printed papers 
dallij came from London, called Diurnal Occurrences, declaring what is done 
in parliament." — Vol. i. p. 336. 

t Chalmers, p. 116. % See Spectator, No. 329. 



RETROSPECT OF THE COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE. 311 

gitica of Milton, the Liberty of Prophesying, and a few other 
controversial or theological treatises of Jeremy Taylor, some 
publications by Fuller, and the successive apocalypses of the 
imperturbable dreamer of Norwich, no work of genius of the first 
class appeared in England in the twenty years from the meeting 
of the Long Parliament to the Eestoration ; and the literary 
productions having any enduring life in them at all, that are to 
be assigned to that space, make but a very scanty sprinkling. 
It was a time when men wrote and thought, as they acted, 
merely for the passing moment. The unprinted plays of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, indeed, were now sent to the press, as well 
as other dramatic works written in the last age ; the theatres, 
by which they used to be published in another way, being shut 
up — a significant intimation, rather than anything else, that the 
great age of the drama was at an end. A new play continued to 
drop occasionally from the commonplace pen of Shirley — almost 
the solitary successor of the Shakespeares, the Fletchers, the 
Jonsons, the Massingers, the Fords, and the rest of that bright 
throng. All other poetry, as well as dramatic poetr}^, was 
nearly silent— hushed partly by the din of arms and of theolo- 
gical and political strife, more by the frown of triumphant 
puritanism, boasting to itself that it had put down all the other 
fine arts as well as poetry, never again to lift their heads in 
England. It is observable that even the confusion of the contest 
that lasted till after the king's death did not so completely 
banish the Muses, or drown their voice, as did the grim tran- 
quillity under the sway of the parliament that follo^^'ed. The 
time of the war, besides, the treatises just alluded to of Milton, 
Taylor, Fuller, and Browne, produced the Cooper's Hill, and 
some other poetical pieces, by Denham, and the republication 
of the Comus and other early poems of Milton ; the collection of 
the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Cowley's volume en- 
titled The Mistress, appeared in 1647, in the short interval of 
doubtful quiet between the first and the second war ; the volume 
of Herrick's poetry was published the next year, while the second 
war was still raging, or immediately after its close ; Lovelace's 
first volume, in 1649, probably before the execution of the king. 
Hobbes's Leviathan, and one or two other treatises of his, all 
written some time before, were printed at London in 1650 and 
1651, while the author was resident in Paris. For some years 
from this date the blank is nearly abs^olute. Then, when the 
more liberal despotism of Cromwell had displaced the Presb}'- 
terian moroseness of the parliament, we have Fuller's Church 
History printed in 1655 ; Harrington's Oceana, and the collec- 



312 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tion of Cowley's poetry, in 1656 ; Browne's Hydriotaphia and 
Garden of Cyrus, in 1658 ; Lovelace's second volume, and Hales's 
Eemains, in 1659 ; together witli two or three philosophical 
publications by Hobbes, and a few short pieces in verse by 
vV'aller, of which the most famous is his Panegyric on Oliver 
Cromwell, written after the Protector's death, an occasion which 
also afforded its first considerable theme to the ripening genius 
of Dryden. It is to be noted, moreover, that, with one illus- 
trious exception, none of the writers that have been named 
belonged to the prevailing faction. If Waller and Dryden took 
that side in their verses for a moment, it must be admitted that 
they both amply made up for their brief conformity ; Denham, 
Browne, Taylor, Herrick, Lovelace, Fuller, Hales, Hobbes, 
Cowley, were all consistent, most of them ardent, royalists ; 
Harrington was a theoretical republican, but even he was a 
royalist by personal attachments ; Milton alone was in life and 
heart a Commonwealth-man and a Cromwellian. 



Poetry of Milton. 

From the appearance of his minor poems, in 1645, Milton had 
published no poetry, with the exception of a sonnet to Henry 
Lawes, the musician, prefixed to a collection of Psalm tunes by 
that composer in 1648, till he gave to the world Lis Paradise 
Lost, in Ten Books, in 1667. In 1671 appeared his Paradise 
Eegained and Samson Agonistes ; in 1 673 a new edition of his 
minor poems, with nine new sonnets and other additions ; and 
in 1674, what is properly the second edition of the Paradise 
Lost, now distributed (by the bisection of the seventh and tenth) 
into twelve books. He died on Sunday the 8th of November, in 
that year, when within about a month of completing the sixty- 
sixth 3^ear of his age. His prose writings have been already 
noticed. Verse, however, was the form in which his genius had 
earliest expressed itself, and also that in which he had first come 
forth as an author. Passing over his paraphrases of one or two 
Psalms, done at a still earlier age, we have abundant promise of 
the future great poet in his lines On the Death of a Fair Infant, 
beginning, 

fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted, 

written in his seventeenth year ; and still more in the College 
Exercise, written in his nineteenth year. A portion of this 
latter is almost as prophetic as it is beautiful ; and, as the 



POETRY OF MILTON. 313 

verses have not been mncli noticed,* we will here give a few of 

them : — 

Hail, native Language, that by sinews weak 
Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak, 
And mad'st imperfect words with, childish trips, 
Half-unpronounced, slide through my infant lips : 

I have some naked thoughts that rove about, 
And loudly knock to have their passage out ; 
And, weary of their place, do only stay 
Till thou hast deck'd them in their best array. 

Yet I had rather, if I were to choose, 

Thy service in some graver subject use, 

Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, 

Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound ; 

Such where the deep transported mind may soar 

Above the Avheeling poles, and at heaven's door 

Look in, and see each blissful deity 

How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, 

Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings 

To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings 

Immortal nectar to her kingly sire : 

Then, passing through the spheres of watchful fire, 

And misty regions of wide air next under, 

And hills of snow, and lofts of piled thunder, 

May tell at length how green-eyed Neptune raves, 

In heaven's defiance mustering all his Avaves ; 

Then sing of secret things that came to pass 

When beldame Nature in her cradle was ; 

And last of kings, and queens, and heroes old, 

Such as the wise Deraodocus once told 

In solemn songs at King Alcinous' feast. 

While sad Ulysses' soul and all the rest 

Are held with his melodious harmony 

In Avilling chains and sweet captivity. 

This was written in 1627. Fourteen years later, after his return 
from Italy, where some of his juvenile Latin compositions, and 
some others in the same language, which, as he tells us, he " had 
shifted in scarcity of books and conveniences to patch up amongst 
them, were received with written encomiums, which the Italian 
is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps ;" and 
when assenting in so far to these commendations, and not less 

* Mr. Hallam, in his work on the Literature of Europe (iii. 269), inad- 
vertently assumes that we have no English verse of Milton's written before his 
twenty-second year. 



314 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon him, he 
had ventured to indulge the hope that, by labour and study — 
"which I take," he nobly says, "to be my portion in this 
life" — ^joined with the strong propensity of nature, he "might 
perhaps leave something so written in after-times as they 
should not willingly let it die " — he continued still inclined to 
fix all the industry and art he could unite to the adorning of his 
native tongue — or, as he goes on to say, "to be an interpreter 
and relator of the best and sagest things among mine own 
citizens, throughout this island, in the mother-dialect; — that 
what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern 
Italy, and those Hebrews of old, did for their countr}^ I, in my 
proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might 
do for mine ; not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps 
I could attain to that, but content with these British islands as 
my world ; " and he again, more distinctly than before, though 
still only in general expressions, announced the great design, 
" of highest hope and hardest attempting," which he proposed 
to himself one day to accomplish— whether in the epic form, as 
exemplified by Homer, Virgil, and Tasso, or after the dramatic, 
"wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign" — or in the style of 
" those magnific odes and hymns " of Pindarus and Callimachus ; 
not forgetting that of all these kinds of writing the highest 
models are to be found in the Holy Scriptures — in the Book 
of Job, in the Song of Solomon and the Apocalypse of St. John, 
in the frequent songs interspersed throughout the Law and the 
Prophets. " The thing which I had to say," concluded this 
remarkable announcement, " and those intentions which have 
lived within me ever since I could conceive myself anything 
worth to my country, I return to crave excuse that urgent reason 
hath plucked from me by an abortive and foredated discovery. 
And the accomplishment of them lies not but in a power above 
man's to promise ; but that none hath hy more studious ways 
endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit that none shall, 
that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure 
will extend ; and that the land had once enfranchised herself 
from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious 
and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish. 
^»" either do 1 think it shame to covenant with any knowing 
reader, that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him 
toward the payment of what I am now indebted ; as being a 
work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of 
wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar 
amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite ; nor to be 



POETRY OF MILTON. 315 

obtained by the invocation of dame Memory and her Siren 
daughters ; but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can 
enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his 
seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify 
the lips of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious 
and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly 
and generous arts and affairs. Till which in some measure be 
accomplished, at mine own peril and cost I refuse not to sustain 
this expectation from as many as are not loth to hazard as much 
credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them."* 

Before this, there had appeared in prini> of Milton's poetry only 
his Comus and Lycidas ; the former in 1637, the latter with some 
other Cambridge verses on the same occasion, the loss at sea of 
his friend Edward King, in 1688 ; but, besides some of his 
sonnets and other minor pieces, he had also written the fragment 
entitled Arcades, and the two companion poems the L'Allegro 
and the II Penseroso. These productions already attested the 
worthy successor of the greatest writers of English verse in the 
preceding age — recalling the fancy and the melody of the minor 
poems of Spenser and Shakespeare, and of the Faithful Shep- 
herdess of Fletcher. The Comus, indeed, might be considered 
as an avowed imitation of the last-mentioned production. The 
resemblance in poetical character between the two sylvan dramas 
of Fletcher and Milton is very close ; and they may be said to 
stand apart from all else in our literature — for Ben Jonson's Sad 
Shepherd is not for a moment to be compared with either, and 
in the Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare, ever creative, 
passionate, and dramatic beyond all other writers, has soared so 
high above both, whether we look to the supernatural part of his 
fable or to its scenes of human interest, that we are little re- 
minded of his peopled woodlands, his fairies, his lovers, or his 
glorious " rude mechanicals," either by the Faithful Shepherdess 
or the Comus. Of these two compositions, Milton's must be 
admitted to have the higher moral inspiration, and it is also the 
more elaborate and exact as a piece of writing ; but in all that 
goes to make up dramatic effect, in the involvement and conduct 
of the story, and in the eloquence of natural feeling, Fletcher's is 
decidedly superior. It has been remarked that even in Shakes- 
peare's early narrative poems — his Venus and Adonis, and his 
Tarquin and Lucrece — we may discern the future great dramatist 
by the full and un withholding abandonment with which he there 
projects himself into whatever character he brings forward, and 

* The Reason of Church Govermnent urged against Prelaty (published in 
1641). . 



316 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

the power of vivid conception with which he realizes the 
visionarj^ scene, and brings it around him almost in the distinct- 
ness of broad daylight, as shown by a peculiar directness and life 
of expression evidently coming everywhere unsought, and escap- 
ing from his pen, one might almost say without his own con- 
sciousness, — without apparently any feeling, at least, of either 
art exercised or feat achieved.* In the case of Milton, on the 
contrary, his first published poem and earliest poetical attempt 
of any considerable extent, although in the dramatic form, affords 
abundant evidence that his genius was not dramatic. Comus is 
an exquisitely beautiful poem, but nearly destitute of everything 
we more especially look for in a drama — of passion, of character, 
of story, of action or movement of any kind. It flows on in a 
continued stream of eloquence, fancy, and most melodious versi- 
fication ; but there is no dialogue, properly so called, no replica- 
tion of diverse emotions or natures ; it is Milton alone who sings 
or declaims all the while, — sometimes of course on one side of the 
argument, sometimes on the other, and not, it may be, without 
changing his attitude and the tone of his voice, but still speaking 
only from one head, from one heart, from one ever-present and 
ever-dominant constitution of being. And from this imprison- 
ment within himself Milton never escapes, either in his dramatic 
or in his other poetry ; it is the characteristic which distinguishes 
him not only from our great dramatists, but also from other great 
epic and narrative poets. His poetry has been sometimes de- 
scribed as to an unusual degree wanting in the expression of his 
own personal feelings ; and, notwithstanding some remarkable 
instances of exception, not only in his minor pieces, but in his 
great epic, the remark is true in a certain sense. He is no ha- 
bitual brooder over his own emotions, no self-dissector, no system- 
atic resorter for inspiration to the accidents of his own personal 
history. His subject in some degree forbade this ; his proud and 
lofty nature still more withheld him from it. But, although dis- 
daining thus to picture himself at full length either for our pity 
or admiration, he has yet impressed the stamp of his own indi- 
viduality — of his own character, moral as well as intellectual — as 
deep on all he has written as if his theme had been ever so 
directly himself. Compare him in this respect with Homer. We 
scarcely conceive of the old Greek poet as having a sentient 
existence at all, any more than we do of the sea or the breezes 
of heaven, whose music his continuous, undulating verse, ever 
various, ever the same, resembles. Who in the delineation of 

* See this illustrated in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. 



POETRY OF MILTON. 317 

the wrath of Achilles finds a trace of the temper or character of 
the delineator ? Who in Milton's Satan does not recognize much 
of Milton himself? But, although the spirit of his poetry is thus 
essentially egotistic, the range of his poetic power is not thereby 
confined within narrow limits. He had not the "myriad-minded" 
nature of Shakespeare — the all-penetrating sympathy by which 
the greatest of dramatists could transform himself for the time 
into any one of the other existences around him, no matter how 
high, no matter how low : conceive the haughty genius of Milton 
emplo^^ed in the task of developing such a character as Justice 
Shallow, or Bottom the weaver, or a score of others to be found 
in the long, various, brilliant procession headed by Falstaff and 
ending with Dogberry ! Anything of this kind he could scarcely 
have performed much better than the most ordinarily gifted of 
the sons of men ; he had no more the wit or humour requisite for 
it than he had the power of intense and universal sympathy. 
But his proper region was still a vast one ; and there, his vision, 
though always tinged with the colour of his own passions and 
opinions, was, notwithstanding, both as far reaching and as 
searching as any poet's ever was. In its style or form his poetry 
may be considered to belong rudimentally to the same Italian 
school with that of the greatest of his predecessors — of Spenser 
and of Shakespeare, if not also of Chaucer. But, as of these 
others, so it is true of him, that the inspiration of his Italian 
models is most perceptible in his earlier and minor verses, and 
that in his more mature and higher efforts he enriched this ori- 
ginal basis of his poetic manner with so much of a different 
character, partly derived from other foi'eign sources, partly pe- 
culiar to hiniself, that the mode of conception and expression 
which he ultimately thus worked out is most correctly described 
by calling it his own. Conversant as he was with the language 
and literature of Italy, his poetry probably acquired what it has 
of Italian in its character principally through the medium of the 
elder poets of his own country ; and it is, accordingly, still more 
English than Italian. Much of its inner spirit, and something 
also of its outward fashion, is of Hebrew derivation : it may be 
affirmed that from the fountain of no other foreign literature did 
Milton drink with so much eagerness as from this, and that by 
no other was his genius so much nourished and strengthened. 
Not a little, also, one so accomplished in the lore of classic anti- 
quity must needs have acquired from that source ; the tones ol 
the poetry of Greece and Eome are heard more or less audibly 
everywhere in that of the great epic poet of England. But do we 
go too far in holding that in what he has actually achieved in his 



318 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

proper domain, the modern writer rises high. " above all Greek, 
above all Roman fame?" Where in the poetry of the ancient 
world shall we find anything which approaches the richness and 
beauty, still less the sublimity, of the most triumphant passages 
in Paradise Lost ? The First Book of that poem is probably the 
most splendid and perfect of human compositions — the one, that 
is to say, which unites these two qualities in the highest degree ; 
and the Fourth is as unsurpassed fur grace and luxuriance as that 
is for magnificence of imagination. And, though these are 
perhaps the two greatest books in the poem, taken each as a 
whole, there are passages in every one of the other books equal 
or almost equal to the finest in these. And worthy of the 
thoughts that breathe are the words that bum. A tide of 
gorgeous eloquence rolls on from beginning to end, like a river of 
molten gold ; outblazing, we may surely say, everything of the 
kind in any other poetry. Finally, Milton's blank verse, both 
for its rid.1 and varied music and its exquisite adaptation, would 
in itself almost deserve to be styled poetry, without the words : 
alone of all our poets, before or since, he has brought out the full 
capabilities of the language in that form of composition. Indeed, 
out of the drama, he is still our only great blank verse writer. 
Compared to his, the blank verse of no other of our narrative or 
didactic poets, unless we are to except a few of the happiest at- 
tempts at the direct imitation of his pauses and cadences, reads 
like anything else than a sort of muffled rhyme — rhyme spoilt by 
the ends being blunted or broken off. Who remembers, who can 
repeat, any narrative blank verse but his ? In whose ear does 
any other linger ? What other has the true organ tone which 
makes the music of this form of verse— either the grandeur or the 
sweetness ? 

It is natuT-al, in comparing, or contrasting, Milton's Paradise 
Lost with his Paradise Regained, to think of the two great 
Homeric epics ; the Iliad commonly believed by antiquity to 
have proceeded from the inspired poet in the vigour and glow of 
his manhood or middle age, the Odyssey to reflect the milder 
radiance of his imagination in the afternoon or evening of his 
life. It has been common accordingly to apply to the case of the 
English poet also the famous similitude of Longinus, and to say 
that in the Paradise Regained we have the sun on his descent, 
the same indeed as ever in majesty (ro fxeyedoo), but deprived 
of his overpowering ardour (^t'x" ^^^ (r(^olp6Tr}TOQ). Some have 
gone farther, not claiming for the Paradise Regained the honour 
of being sunshine at all, but only holding it worth}^ of being 
applauded in the spirit and after the fashion in which Pope 



POETRY OF MILTON. 319 

has eulogized the gracious though not dazzling qualities of his 
friend Martha Blount : — 

So, when the sun's hroad beam has tired the sight, 

All mild ascends the moon's more sober hght ; 

Serene in virgin modesty she shines, 

And unobserved the glaring orb declines. 
An ingenious tlieory has been put forth by one of the editors of 
the Paradise Regained, Mr. Charles Dunster ; he conceives that 
Milton designed this poem for an example of v^hat he has himself 
in the remarkable passage of his Eeason of Church Government, 
to v^hich M'e have already had occasion to refer, spoken of as the 
brief epic, and distinguished from the great and diffuse epic, such as 
those of Homer and of Viigil, and his ov^^n Paradise Lost. 
Milton's v^ords in full are : — " Time serves not now, and, per- 
haps, I might seem too profuse, to give any certain account of 
Avhat the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, 
liath liberty to propose to herself, -though of highest hope and 
hardest attempting ; whether that epic form, whereof the two 
poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a 
diffuse, and the book of Job a brief, model." Dunster accordingly 
thinks that we may suppose the model which Milton set before 
liim in his Paradise Regained to have been in a great measure 
the book of Job.* 

But surely the comparison which the companionship or se- 
quence of the two Miltonic epics most forcibly suggests to a true 
feeling of both their resemblance and their difference, and of the 
prevailing spirit that animates each, is that of the Old and the 
New Testament. The one is distinctively Hebrew, the other as 
distinctively Christian. With much in common, they have also, 
like the two religions, and the two collections of sacred books, 
much in which they are unlike, and in a certain sense ojDposed to 
ooe another, both in manner and in sentiment. The poetry of 
the Paradise Lost, all life and movement, is to that of the Para- 
dise Regained what a conflagration is to a sunlit landscape. In 
the one we have the grandeur of the old worship, in the other 
the simplicity of the new. The one addresses itself more to the 
sense, the other to the understanding. In respect either of force 
or of variety, either of intense and burning passion or of ima- 
ginative power mingling and blending all the wondeis of bright- 
ness and gloom, there can be no comparison between them. 
There is the same poetic art, it is true, in both poems ; they are 
more unmistakeably products of the same mind, perhaps, than are 

* Paradise Kegained ; with notes. By Charles Dunster, M.A. 4to. Lond. 
1795. p. 2. 



320 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

the Iliad and the Odyssey ; and yet the difference between them 
in tone and character is greater than that between the two Greek 
epics. It is in some respects like the difference between an oil- 
painting and a painting in water-colours. The mere brevity of 
the one as compared with the other would stamp it as a work of 
inferior pretension, and it is still more limited in subject or scope 
than it is in dimensions. The Paradise Regained must be con- 
sidered, in fact, as only an appendage to the Paradise Lost. Yet, 
comparatively short as it is, the thread of the narrative is felt to 
be spun out and over-much attenuated. It contains some highly 
finished and exquisite passages ; but perhaps the only poetical 
quality in which it can be held to match, if it does not sometimes 
even surpass, the Paradise Lost, is picturesqueness. In that it 
more resembles the L' Allegro and the 11 Penseroso than it does its 
companion epic. Even the argumentative eloquence, of which it 
is chiefly made up, brilliant as it is, is far from being equal to 
the best of that in the Paradise Lost. It has the same ingenuity 
and logic, with as much, or perhaps even more, concentration in 
the expression ; but, unavoidably^ it may be, from the circum- 
stances of the case, it has not either the same glow and splendour 
or even the same tone of real feeling. The fallen spirits throng- 
ing Pandemonium, or stretched on the burning lake before that 
gorgeous pile "rose like an exhalation," consult and debate, in 
their misery and anxious perplexity, with an accent of human 
earnestness which it was impossible to give either to the conscious 
sophistry of their chief in that other scene or to the wisdom more 
than human by w^hicli he is refuted and repelled. 

It is commonl}^ said that Milton himself professed to prefer the 
Paradise Eegained to the Paradise Lost. The probability is that, 
if he asserted the former to be the better poem of the two, it was 
only in a qualified sense, or with reference to something else than 
its poetical merits, and in the same feeling with which he ex- 
plained the general prevalence of the opposite opinion by attri- 
buting it to most people having a much stronger feeling of regret 
for the loss of Paradise than desire for the recovery of it, or at 
least inclination for the only way in which it was to be recovered. 
It was very characteristic of him, however, to be best pleased 
with what he had last produced, as well as to be only confirmed 
in his partiality by having the general voice against him and by 
his contempt for what of extravagance and injustice there w^as in 
the popular depreciation of the new poem. He was in all things 
by temper and mental constitution essentially a partisan ; seeing 
clearly, indeed, all that was to be said on both sides of any ques- 
tion, but never for all that remaining in suspense between them. 



COWLEY. 321 

or hesitating to make up his mind and to take his place distinctly 
on one side. This is shown by the whole course of his life. Nor 
is it less expressively proclaimed not only by the whole tone and 
manner of his poetry, everywhere so ardent, impetuous, and 
dogmatical, and so free from the faintest breath either of suspi- 
cion or of any kind of self-distrust, but even in that argumenta- 
tive eloquence which is one of its most remarkable characteris- 
tics. For one of the chief necessary conditions of the existence 
of oratorical or debating power, and, indeed, of every kind of 
fighting ability, is that it should, at one and the same time, both 
feel passionately in favour of its own side of the question and 
discern clearly the strength of the adverse position. Whatever 
may be the fact as to his alleged preference of the Paradise Ee- 
gained to the Paradise Lost, Milton has, at any rate, pronounced 
judgment in a sufficiently decisive and uncompromising way upon 
another point in regard to which both these works stand con- 
trasted with much of his earlier poetry. We refer to his vehement 
denunciation, in a notice prefixed to the Paradise Lost,* of rhyme 
as being, in all circumstances, for he makes no exception, "a 
thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical 
delight," and as having no claim to be regarded as anything else 
than the barbarous invention of a barbarous age, and a mere 
jingle and life-repressing bondage. We certainly rejoice that the 
Paradise Lost is not written in rhyme ; but we are very glad 
that these strong views were not taken up by the great poet till 
after he had produced his L'Allegro and II Penseroso, his Ly- 
cidas and his Sonnets. 



Cowley. 

The poetry of Milton, though principally produced after the 
Restoration, belongs in everything but in date to the preceding 
age ; and this is also nearly as true of that of Cowley. Abraham 
Cowley, bom in London in 1618, published his first volume of 
verse, under the title of Poetic Blossoms, in 1633, when he was 
yet only a boy of fifteen : one piece contained in this publication, 
indeed— The Tragical History of Pyramus and Thisbe — was 
written when he was only in his tenth year. The four books of 
his unfinished epic entitled Davideis were mostly written while 
he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. His pastoral 

* This notice, commonly headed The Verse in modern editions of the poem, 
is found in three of the five various foi-ms of the first edition (1667, 1668, and 
1669), and there bears the superscription The Printer to theBeader ; but there 
can be no doubt that it is Milton's own. 

Y 



822 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

drama of Love's Eiddle, and his Latin comedy called Naufragium 
Joculare, were both published in 1638. In 1647 appeared his col- 
lection of amatory poems entitled The Mistress, and in 1653 his 
comedy of The Guardian, afterwards altered, and republished as 
The Cutter of Coleman Street. After the Restoration he collected 
such of his pieces as he thought worth preserving, and repub- 
lished them, together with some additional productions, of which 
the most important were his Davideis, and his Pindarique Odes. 
Few poets have been more popular, or more praised, in their 
own time than Cowley. Milton is said to have declared that the 
three greatest English poets were Spenser, Shakespeare, and 
Cowley ; though it does not follow that he held all three to be 
equally great. Sir John Denham, in some verses on Cowley's 
Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets in AVestminster 
Abbey, sets him above all the English poets that had gone before 
him, and prophesies that posterity will hold him to have been 
equalled by Yirgil alone among those of antiquity. For a long 
time, too, his works appear to have been more generally read 
than those of any other English poet, if a judgment may be foiined 
from the frequency with which they were reprinted, and the 
nuiuerous copies of them in various forms that still exist.* This 
popular favour they seem to have shared with those of Donne, 
whose legitimate successor Cowley was considered to be ; or 
rather, when the poetry of Donne became obsolete or unfashion- 
able, that of Cowley took its place in the reading and admiration 
of the poetical part of the public. Cowley, indeed, is in the main 
a mere modernization and dilution of Donne. With the same 
general characteristics of manner, he is somewhat less forced and 
fantastical, a good deal less daring in every way, but unfortu- 
nately also infinitely less poetical. Everything about him, in 
short, is less deep, strong, and genuine. His imagination is 
tinsel, or mfere surface gilding, compared to Donne's solid gold ; 
his wit little better than word-catching, to the profound medita- 
tive quaintness of the elder poet ; and of passion, with which all 
Donne's finest lines are tremulous, Cowley has none. Consider- 
able grace and dignity occasionally distinguit>h his Pindaric 
Odes (which, however, are Pindaric only in name) ; and he has 
shoMTL much elegant playfulness of style and fancy in his transla- 
tions from and imitations of Anacreon, and in some other verses 
written in the same manner. As for what he intends for love 
verses, some of them are pretty enough frost-work ; but the only 
sort of love there is in them is the love of point and sparkle. 

* A tweltth edition of the collection formed by Cowley himself was pub- 
lished by Tonson m 1721. 



323 



Butler. 



This manner of writing is more fitly applied by another cele- 
brated poet of the same date, Samuel Butler, the immortal author 
of Hudibras. Butler, born in 1612, is said to have written most 
of liis great poem during the interregnum ; but the first part of 
it was not published till 1663. The poetry of Butler has been 
very happily designated as merely the comedy of that style of 
composition which Donne and Cowley practised in its more 
serious form — the difference between the two modes of writing 
being much the same with that which is presented by a counte- 
nance of a peculiar cast of features when solemnized by deep 
reflection, and the same countenance when lighted up by cheer- 
fulness or distorted by mirth.* And it may be added, that the 
gayer and more animated expression is here, upon the whole, the 
more natural. The quantity of explosive matter of all kinds 
which Butler has contrived to pack up in his verses is amazing , 
it is crack upon crack, flash upon flash, from the first line of his 
long poem to the last. Much of this incessant bedazzlement is, 
of course, merely verbal, or otherwise of the humblest species of 
wit ; but an infinite number of the happiest things are also thrown 
out. And Hudibras is far from being all mere broad farce. 
Butler's power of arguing in verse, in his own way, may almost 
be put on a par with Dryden's in his ; and, perseveringly as he 
devotes himself upon system to the exhibition of the ludicrous 
and grotesque, he sometimes surprises us with a sudden gleam of 
the truest beauty of thought and expression breaking out from the 
midst of the usual rattling fire of smartnesses and conundrums — 
as when in one place he exclaims of a thin cloud drawn over the 
moon — 

Mysterious veil ; of brightness made, 
At once her lustre and her shade ! 

He must also be allowed to tell his story and to draw his charac- 
ters well, independently of his criticisms. 



Waller. 

The most celebrated among the minor poets of the period be- 
tween the Eestoration and the Eevolution was Waller. Edmund 
Waller, bom in 1605, had, as already noticed, announced himself 
as a writer of verse before the close of the reign of James I., by 
* Scott, in Life of Dryden. 



32i ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

his lines on the escape of Prince Charles at the port of San 
Aiidero, in the Bay of Biscay, on his return from Spain, in Sep- 
tember, 1623 ; and he continued to write till after the accession 
of James II., in whose reign he died, in the year 1687. His last 
production was the little poem concluding with one of his 
happiest, one of his most characteristic, and one of his best- 
known passages : — 

The soul's da'-k cottage, battered and decayed, 

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made : 

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become 

As they draw near to their eternal home : 

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, 

That stand upon the threshold of the new. 

Fenton, his editor, tells us that a number of poems on religious 
subjects, to which these verses refer, were mostly written when 
he was about [above] eighty years old; and he has himself 
intimated that his bodily faculties were now almost gone : — 

When we for age could neither read nor write, 
The subject made us able to indite. 

Waller, therefore, as well as Milton, Cowley, and Butler, may be 
considered to have formed his manner in the last age ; but his 
poetry does not belong to the old English school even so much as 
that of either Butler or Cowley. The contemporaries of the 
earlier portion of his long career were Carew and Lovelace ; and 
with them he is properly to be classed in respect of poetical style 
and manner. Both Lovelace and Carew, however, as has been 
already intimated, have more passion than Waller, who, with all 
his taste and elegance, was incapable of either expressing or feel- 
ing anything very lofty or generous — being, in tiiith, poet as he 
was, a very mean-souled description of person, as his despicable 
political course sufficiently evinced. His poetry accordingly is 
iDeyond the reach of critical animadversion on the score of such 
extravagance as is sometimes prompted by strong emotion. 
Waller is always perfectly master of himself, and idolizes his 
mistress with quite as much coolness and self-possession as he 
flatters his prince. But, although cold and unafFecting at all 
times, he occasionally rises to much dignity of thought and 
manner. His panegyric on Cromwell, the offering of his grati- 
tude to the Protector for the permission granted to him of re- 
turning to England after ten years' exile, is one of the most 
graceful pieces of adulation ever offered by poetry to power; and 
the poet is here probably more sincere than in most of his 
effusions, for the occasion was one on which he was likely to be 



MARVEL. 325 

moved to more than usual earnestness of feeling. A few years 
after lie welcomed Charles II. on his restoration to the throne of 
his ancestors in another poem, which has been generally con- 
sidered a much less spirited composition : Fenton accounts for 
the falling oft" by the author's advance in the meanwhile from his 
forty-ninth to his fifty-fifth year — "from which time," he ob- 
serves, "his genius began to decline apace from its meridian;" 
but the poet himself assigned another reason : — when Charles 
frankly told him that he thought his own panegyric much inferior 
to Cromwell's, " Sir," replied Waller, " we poets never succeed so 
well in writing truth as in fiction." Perhaps the true reason, 
after all, might be that his majesty's return to England was not 
quite so exciting a subject to Mr. Waller's muse as his own re- 
turn had been. One thing must be admitted in regard to 
Waller's poetry ; it is free from all mere verbiage and empty 
sound ; if he rarely or never strikes a very powerful note, there 
is at least always something for the fancy or the understanding, 
as well as for the ear, in what he writes. He abounds also in 
ingenious thoughts, which he dresses to the best advantage, and 
exhibits with great transparency of style. Eminent, however, as 
he is in his class, he must be reckoned among that subordinate 
class of poets who think and express themselves chiefly in simili- 
tudes, not among those who conceive and write passionately and 
metaphorically. He had a decorative and illuminating, but not 
a transforming imagination. 



Marvel. 

The chief writer of verse on the popular side after the 
Eestoration was Andrew Marvel, the noble-minded member for 
Hull, the friend of Milton, and, in that age of brilliant pro- 
fligacy, renowned alike as the first of patriots and of wits. 
Marv^el, the son of the Eev. Andrew Marvel, master of the 
grammar-school of Hull, was bom there in 1620, and died in 
1678. His poetical genius has scarcely had justice done to it. 
He is the author of a number of satires in verse, in which a rich 
vein of vigorous, though often coarse, humour runs through a 
careless, extemporaneous style, and which did prodigious execu- 
tion in the party warfare of the day ; but some of his other 
poetry, mostly perhaps written in the earlier part of his life, 
is eminent both for the delicate bloom of the sentiment and 
for grace of form. His Song of the Exiles, beginning " Where 
the remote Bermudas ride," is a gem of melody, picturesqueness, 



826 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

and sentiment, nearly without a flaw, and is familiar to every 
lover of poetry. The following verses, which are less known, 
are exquisitely elegant and tuneful. They are entitled The 
Picture of T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers : — 

See with what simphcity 

This nymph begins her golden days ! 

In the green grass she loves to lie, 

And there with her fair aspect tames 

The wilder flowers, and gives them names ; 

But only with the roses plays, 

And them does tell 

What colour best becomes them, and what smell. 

Who can foretell for what high cause 
This darling of the gods was born ? 
See this is she whose chaster laws 
The wanton Love shall one day fear, 
And, under her command severe, 
See his bow broke and ensigns torn. 
Happy who can 
Appease this virtuous enemy of man ! 

then let me in time compound, 

And parley with those conquering eyes ; 

Ere they have tried their force to wound, 

Ere with their glancing wheels they drive 

In triumph over hearts that strive. 

And them that yield but more despise. 

Let me be laid 

Where I may see the glory from some shade. 

Meantime, whilst every verdant thing 
Itself does at thy beauty charm,^ 
Eeform the errors of the spring : 
Make that the tulips may have share 
Of sweetness, seeing they are fair ; 
And roses of their thorns disarm : 
But most procure 
That violets may a longer age endure. 

But oh, young beauty of the woods, 
Whom nature courts with fi-uits and flowers, 
Gather the flowers, but spare the buds ; 
Lest Flora, angry at thy crime 
To kill her infants in their prime. 
Should quickly make the example j^ours ; 
And, ere we see, 
Nip in the blossom all our hopes in thee. 



Charm itself, that is, delight itself. 



OTHER MINOR POETS. 327 

Certaiuly neither Carew, nor Waller, nor any other court 
poet of that day, has produced anything in the same style finer 
than these lines. But Marvel's more elaborate poetry is not 
confined to love songs and other such light exercises of an 
ingenious and elegant fancy. Witness his verses on Milton's 
Paradise Lost — " When I beheld the poet blind, yet bold" — 
which have throughout almost the dignity, and in parts more 
than the stren2;th, of Waller. 



Other Minor Poets. 



Of the other minor poets of this date we shall only mention 
the names of a few of the most distinguished. Sir Charles 
Sedley is the Suckling of the time of Charles II., with less 
impulsiveness and more insinuation, but a kindred gaiety and 
sprightliness of fancy, and an answering liveliness and at the 
same time courtly ease and elegance of diction. King Charles, 
a good judge of such matters, was accustomed to say that 
Sedley's style, either in writing or discourse, would be the 
standard of the English tongue ; and his contemporary, the 
Duke of Buckingham (Villiers) used to call his exquisite art of 
expression Sedley's witchcraft. Sedley's genius early ripened 
and bore fruit : he was born only two or three years before the 
breaking out of the Civil War ; and he was in high reputation 
as a poet and a wit within six or seven years after the Restora- 
tion. He survived both the Revolution and the century, dying 
in the year 1701. Sedley's fellow debauchee, the celebrated 
Earl of Rochester (Wilmot) — although the brutal grossness of 
the greater part of his verse has deservedly made it and its 
author infamous — was perhaps a still greater genius. There is 
immense strength and pregnancy of expression in some of the 
best of his compositions, careless and unfinished as they are. 
Rochester had not completed his thirty-third year when he 
died, in July 1680. Of the poetical productions of the other 
court wits of Charles's reign the principal are, the Duke of 
Buckingham's satirical comedy of the Rehearsal, which was very 
effective when first produced, and still enjoys a great reputation, 
though it would probably be thought but a heavy joke now by 
most readers not carried away by the prejudice in its favour ; 
the Earl of Roscommon's very commonplace Essay on Trans- 
lated Verse ; and the Earl of Dorset's lively and well-known 
song, " To all you ladies now on land," written at sea the night 
before the engagement with the Dutch on the 3rd of June, 1665, 



328 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

or rather professing to liave been then written, for the asserted 
poetic tranquillity of the noble author in expectation of the 
morrow's fight has been disputed. The Marquis of Halifax and 
Lord Godolphin were also writers of verse at this date; but 
neither of them has left anything worth remembering. Among 
the minor poets of the time, however, we ought not to forget 
Charles Cotton, best known for his humorous, though somewhat 
coarse, travesties of Virgil and Lucian, and for his continuation 
of Izaak Walton's Treatise on Angling, and his fine idiomatic 
translation of Montaigne's Essays, but also the author of some 
short original pieces in verse, of much fanc}" and liveliness. 
One entitled an Ode to Winter, in particular, has been highly 
praised by Wordsworth. 



Deyden. 

By far the most illustrious name among the English poets of 
the latter half of the seventeenth century — if we exclude 
Milton as belonging properly to the preceding age — is that of 
John Dryden. Born in 1632, Dryden produced his first known 
composition in verse in 1649, his lines on the death of Lord 
Hastings, a young nobleman of great promise, who was suddenly 
cut off by small-pox, on the eve of his intended marriage, in 
that year. This earliest of Dryden's poems is in the most am- 
bitious style of the school of Donne and Cowley : Donne him- 
self, indeed, has scarcely penned anything quite so extravagant 
as one passage, in which the fancy of the young poet runs riot 
among the phenomena of the loathsome disease to which Lord 
Hastings had fallen a victim : — 

So many spots, like naeves on Venus' soil, 

One jewel set otf with so many a foil : 

Blisters with pride swell'd, which through 's flesh did sprout 

Like rose-buds stuck i' the lily skin about. 

Each little pimple had a tear in it, 

To wail the fault its rising did commit : — 

and so forth. Almost the only feature of the future Dryden 
which this production discloses is his deficiency in sensibility 
or heart; exciting as the occasion was, it does not contain an 
affecting line. Perhaps, on comparing his imitation with 
Donne's own poetry, so instinct with tenderness and passion, 
Dryden may have seen or felt that his own wanted the very 
quality which was the light and life of that of his master; at 



DRYDEN. 320 

any rate, wiser than Cowley, who had the same reason for 
shunning a competition with Donne, he abandoned this style 
with his first attempt, and, indeed, for anything that appears, 
gave np the writing of poetry for some years altogether. His 
next verses of any consequence are dated nine years later, — his 
Heroic Stanzas on the death of Oliver Cromwell, —and, destitute 
as they are of the vigorous conception and full and easy flow of 
versification which he afterwards attained, they are free from 
any trace of the elaborate and grotesque absurdity of the Elegy 
on Lord Hastings. His Astrsea Eedux, or poem on the return 
of the king, produced two years after, evinces a growing free- 
dom and command of style. But it is in his Annus Mirabilis, 
written in 1666, that his genius breaks forth for the first time 
with any promise of that full effulgence at which it ultimately 
arrived ; here, in spite of the incumbrance of a stanza (the 
quatrain of alternately rhyming heroics) which he afterwards 
wisely exchanged for a more manageable kind of verse, w^e have 
mu(!h both of the nervous diction and the fervid fancy which 
characterize his latest and best works. From this date to the 
end of his days Dryden's life was one long literary labour; 
eight original poems of considerable length, many shorter pieces, 
twenty-eight dramas, and several volumes of poetical translation 
from Chaucer, Boccaccio, Ovid, Theocritus, Lucretius, Horace, 
Juvenal, Persius, and Virgil, together with numerous discourses 
in prose, some of them very long and elaborate, attest the 
industry as well as the fertility of a mind which so much toil 
and so many draughts upon its resources were so far from 
exhausting, that its powers continued not only to exert them- 
selves with unimpaired elasticity, but to grow stronger and 
brighter to the last. The genius of Dryden certainly did not, 
as that of Waller is said to have done, begin "to decline apace 
from its meridian" after he had reached his fifty-fifth year. 
His famous Alexander's Feast and his Fables, which are among 
his happiest performances, were the last he produced, and were 
published together in the year 1700, only a few months before 
his death, at the age of sixty-eight. 

Dryden has commonly been considered to have founded a new- 
school of English poetry ; but perhaps it would be more strictly 
correct to regard him as having only carried to higher perfection 
—perhaps to the highest to which it has yet been brought — 
a style of poetry which had been cultivated long before his 
day. The satires of Hall and of Marston, and also the Kosce 
Teipsum of Sir John Davies, all published before the end of the 
sixteenth century, not to refer to other less eminent examples. 



330 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

may be classed as of the same school with his poetry. It is a 
school very distinguishable from that to which Milton and the 
greatest of our elder poets belong, deriving its spirit and cha- 
racter, as it does, chiefly from the ancient Roman classic poetry, 
whereas the other is mainly the offspring of the middle ages, of 
Gothic manners and feelings and the Romance or Provencal 
literature. The one therefore may be called, with sufficient 
propriet}^, the classic, the other the romantic school of poetry. 
But it seems to be a mistake to assume that the former first 
arose in England after the Restoration, under the influence of 
the imitation of the French, which then became fashionable ; 
the most that can be said is, that the French taste which then 
became prevalent among us may have encouraged its revival; 
for undoubtedly what has been called the classic school of poetry 
had been cultivated by English writers at a much earlier date ; 
nor is there any reason to suppose that the example of the 
modem poetry of France had had any share in originally 
turning our own into that channel. Marston and Hall, and 
Sackville in his Ferrex and Porrex, and Ben Jonson in his 
comedies and tragedies, and the other early writers of English 
poetry in the classic vein, appear not to have imitated any 
French poets, but to have gone to the fountain-head, and sought 
in the productions of the Roman poets themselves, — in the plays 
of Terence and Seneca, and the satires of Juvenal and Persius, 
— for examples and models. Nay, even Dryden, at a later 
period, probably formed himself almost exclusively upon the 
same originals and upon the works of these his predecessors 
among his own countrymen, and was little, if at all, indebted to 
or influenced by any French pattern. His poetry, unlike as it 
is to that of Milton or Spenser, has still a thoroughlj^ English 
character — an English force and heartiness, and, with all its 
classicality, not a little even of the freedom and luxuriance of 
the more genuine English style. Smooth Waller, who preceded 
him, may have learned something from the modem French poets ; 
and so may Pope, who came after him ; but Dryden's fiery 
energy and "full-resounding line" have nothing in common 
with them in spirit or manner. Without either creative imagina- 
tion or any power of pathos, he is in argument, in satire, and 
in declamatory magnificence, the greatest of our poets. His 
poetry, indeed, is not the highest kind of poetry, but in that 
kind he stands unrivalled and unapproached. Pope, his great 
disciple, who, in correctness, in neatness, and in the brilliancy 
of epigjammatic point, has outshone his master, has not come 
near him in easy flexible vigour, in indignant vehemence, in 



DRAMATISTS. 331 

narrative rapidity, any more than he has in sweep and variety 
of versification. Dryden never writes coldly, or timidly, or 
drowsily. The movement of verse always sets him on fire, and 
whatever he produces is a coinage hot from the brain, not 
slowly scraped or pinched into shape, but struck out as from 
a die with a few stout blows or a single wrench of the screw. 
It is this fervour especially which gives to his personal sketches 
their wonderful life and force : his Absalom and Achitophel is 
the noblest portrait-gallerj^ in poetry. 

It is chiefly as a dramatic writer that Dryden can be charged 
with the imitation of French models. Of his plays, nearly thirty 
in number, the comedies for the most part in prose, the tragedies 
in rhyme, few have much merit considered as entire works, 
although there are brilliant passages and spirited scenes in most 
of them. Of the whole number, he has told us that his tragedy 
of All for Love, or the World well Lost (founded on the story 
of Antony and Cleopatra), w^as the only play he wrote for 
himself ; the rest, he admits, were sacrifices to the vitiated taste 
of the age. His Almanzor, or the Conquest of Granada (in two 
parts), although extravagant, is also full of genius. Of his 
comedies, the Spanish Friar is perhaps the best ; it has some 
most effective scenes. 



Dramatists. 

Many others of the poets of this age Avhose names have been 
already noticed were also dramatists. Milton's Comus was 
never acted publicly, nor his Samson Agonistes at all. Cowley's 
Love's Eiddle and Cutter of Coleman Street were neither of 
them originally written for the stage ; but the latter was brought 
out in one of the London theatres after the Restoration, and was 
also revived about the middle of the last century. Waller 
altered the fifth act of Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy, 
making his additions to the blank verse of the old dramatists in 
rhyme, as he states in a prologue : — 

In this old play vv^hat's new we have expressed 
In rhyming verse distinguish'd from the rest ; 
That, as the Khone its hasty way does make 
(Not mingling waters) through Geneva's lake, 
So, having here the different styles in view, 
You may compare the former with the new. 

Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, besides his Eehearsal, wrote a 



332 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

farce entitled tlie Battle of Sedgmoor, and also altered Bean- 
mont and Fletclier's comedy of The Chances. The tragedy of 
Valentinian of the same writers was altered by the Earl of 
Rochester. Sedley wrote three comedies, mostly in prose, and 
three tragedies, one in rhyme and two in blank verse. And 
Davenant is the author of twenty-five tragedies, comedies, and 
masques, produced between 1629 and his death, in 1668. But 
the most eminent dramatic names of this era are those of Thomas 
Otway, Nathaniel Lee, John Crowne, Sir George Etheridge, 
William Wycherly, and Thomas Southerne. Of six tragedies 
and four comedies written by Otway, his tragedies of the 
Orphan and Venice Preserved still sustain his fame and popu- 
larity as the most pathetic and tear-drawing of all our dramatists. 
Their licentiousness has necessarily banished his comedies from 
the stage, with most of those of his contemporaries. Lee has 
also great tenderness, with much more fire and imagination 
than Otway ; of his pieces, eleven in number — all tragedies — : 
his Theodosius, or the Force of Love, and his Eival Queens, or 
Alexander the Great, are the most celebrated. Crowne, though 
several of his plays were highly successful when first produced, 
was almost forgotten, till Mr. Lamb reprinted some of his scenes 
in his Dramatic Specimens, and showed that no dramatist of 
that age had written finer things. Of seventeen pieces produced 
by Crowne between 1671 and 1698, his tragedy of Thj^estes and 
his comedy of Sir Courtley Kice are in particular of eminent 
merit, the first for its poetry, the second for plot and character. 
Etheridge is the author of only three comedies, the Comical 
Eevenge (1664), She Would if She Could (1668), and the Man 
of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) ; all remarkable for the 
polish and fluency of the dialogue, and entitled to be regarded 
as having first set the example of that modern style of comedy 
which was afterwards cultivated by Wycherly, Farquhar, Van- 
brugh, and Congreve. Wycherly, who was born in 1640, and 
lived till 1715, produced his only four plays, Love in a AVood, 
The Gentleman Dancing Master, The Country Wife, and The 
Plain Dealer, all comedies, between the years 1672 and 1677. 
The two last of these pieces are written with more elaboration 
than anything of Etheridge's, and both contain some bold 
delineation of character and strong satiric writing, reminding us 
at times of Ben Jonson ; but, like him, too, Wycherly is defi- 
cient in ease and nature. Southerne, who was only born in the 
year of the Restoration, and lived till 1746, had produced no 
more than his two first plays before the Eevolution of 1688, 
— his tragedy of the Loyal Brother in 1682, and his comedy 



CLARENDON, 333 

of the Disappointment in 1684. Of ten dramatic pieces of which 
he is the author, five are comedies, and are of little value ; but 
his tragedies of The Fatal Marriage (1692), Oroonoko (1696), and 
The Spartan Dame (1719), are interesting and affecting. 



Prose Writers : — Clarendon. 

Eminent as he is among the poets of his age, Dryden is also 
one of the greatest of its prose writers. In ease, flexibility, and 
variety, indeed, his English prose has scarcely ever been excelled. 
Cowley, too, is a charming writer of prose : the natural, pure, 
and flowing eloquence of his Essays is better than anything in 
his poetry. Waller, Suckling, and Sedley, also, wrote all well in 
prose ; and Marvel's literary reputation is founded more upon his 
prose than upon his verse. Of writers exclusively in prose be- 
longing to the space between the Eestoration and the Revolution, 
Clarendon may be first mentioned, although his great work, his 
History of the Eebellion and Civil Wars, was not jDublished till 
the year 1702, nor his Life and Continuation of his History, 
before 1759. His style cannot be commended for its correctness ; 
the manner in which he constructs his sentences, indeed, often 
sets at defiance all the rules of syntax ; but yet he is never unin- 
telligible or obscure — with such admirable expository skill is the 
matter arranged and spread out, even where the mere verbal 
sentence-making is the most negligent and entangled. The style, 
in fact, is that proper to speaking rather than to writing, and had, 
no doubt, been acquired hy Clarendon, not so much from books 
as from his practice in speaking at the bar and in parliament ; 
for, with great natural abilities, he does not seem to have had 
much acquaintance with literature, or much acquired knowledge 
of any kind resulting from study. But his writing possesses the 
quality that interests above all the graces or artifices of rhetoric 
— the impress of a mind informed by its subject, and having a 
complete mastery over it ; while the broad full stream in which 
it flows makes the reader feel as if he were borne along on its 
tide. The abundance, in particular, with which he pours out 
his stores of language and illustration in his characters of the 
eminent persons engaged on both sides of the great contest 
seems inexhaustible. The historical value of his history, how- 
ever, is not very considerable ; it has not preserved very many 
facts which are not to be found elsewhere ; and, whatever may 
be thought of its general bias, the inaccuracy of its details is so 
great throughout, as demonstrated by the authentic evidences of 



334 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tlie time, that there is scarcely any other contemporary history 
which is so little trustworthy as an authority with regard to 
minute particulars. Clarendon, in truth, was far from being 
placed in the most favourable circumstances for giving a per- 
fectly correct account of many of the events he has undertaken 
to record : he was not, except for a very short time, in the midst 
of the busy scene : looking to it, as he did, from a distance, while 
the mighty drama was still only in progress, he was exposed to 
some chances of misconception to which even those removed from 
it by a long interval of time are not liable ; and, without im- 
puting to him any further intention to deceive than is implied in 
the purpose which we may suppose he chiefly had in view in 
writing his work, the vindication of his own side of the question, 
his position as a partisan, intimately mixed up with the aftairs 
and interests of one of the two contending factions, could not 
fail both to bias his own judgment, and even in some measure to 
distort or colour the reports made to him by others. On the 
whole, therefore, this celebrated work is rather a great literary 
performance than a very valuable historical monument. 



HOBBES. 

Another royalist history of the same times and events to which 
Clarendon's work is dedicated, the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes 
of Malmesbury, introduces one of the most distinguished names 
both in English literature and in modern metaphysical, ethical, 
and political philosophy. Hobbes, born in 1588, commenced 
author in 1628, at the age of forty, by publishing his translation 
of Thucydides, but did not produce his first original work, his 
Latin treatise entitled De Cive, till 1642. This was followed by 
his treatises entitled Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, in 
1650 ; his Leviathan, in 1651 ; his translations in verse of the 
Iliad and Odyssey, in 1675 ; and his Behemoth, or History of the 
Causes of the Civil Wars of England, and of the counsels and 
artifices by which they were carried on, from the year 1640 to 
the year 1 660, a few months after his death, at the age of ninety- 
two, in 1679. Eegarded merely as a writer of English, there 
can be little difference of opinion about the high rank to be 
assigned to Hobbes. He has been described as our first uni- 
formly careful and correct writer ;* and he may be admitted to 
have at least set the first conspicuous and influential example in 

* Hallam, Lit. of Eur. iv. 316. 



HOBBES. 335 

what may be called our existing English (for Roger Ascham, Sir 
Thomas Elyot, and one or two other early writers, seem to have 
aimed at the same thing in a preceding stage of the language), 
of that regularity of style which has since his time been generally 
attended to. This, however, is his least merit. No writer has 
succeeded in making language a more perfect exponent of thought 
than it is as employed by Hobbes. His style is not poetical or 
glowingly eloquent, because his mind was not poetical, and the 
subjects about which he wrote would have rejected the ex- 
aggerations of imaginative or passionate expression if he had 
been capable of supplying such. But in the prime qualities 
of precision and perspicuity, and also in economy and succinct- 
ness, in force and in terseness, it is the very perfection of a mei'ely 
expository style. Without any affectation of point, also, it often 
shapes itself easily and naturally into the happiest aphoristic and 
epigrammatic forms. Hobbes's clearness and aptness of expres- 
sion, the effect of which is like that of reading a book with a 
good light, never forsake him — not even in that most singular 
performance, his version of Homer, where there is scarcely a 
trace of ability of any other kind. There are said to be only two 
lines in that work in which he is positively poetical ; those which 
describe the infant Astyanax in the scene of the parting of Hector 
and Andromache, in the Sixth Book of the Iliad : — 

Now Hector met her with her Httle hoy, 

That in the nurse's arms was carried ; 
And like a star upon her bosom lay 

His beautiful and shining golden head. 

But there are other passages in which by dint of mere directness 
and transparency of style he has rendered a line or two happily 
enough— as, for instance, in the description of the descent of 
Apollo at the prayer of Chryses, in the beginning of the 
poem : — 

His praj^er was granted by the deity, 

Who, with his silver bow and arrows keen, 
Descended from Olympus silently, 
In likeness of the sable night unseen. 

As if expressly to proclaim and demonstrate, however, that this 
momentary success was merely accidental, immediately upon the 
]j>ack of this stanza comes the following : — 

His bow and quiver both behind him hang, 

The arrows chink as often as he jogs, 
And as he shot the bow was heard to twang, 

And first his arrows flew at mules and dogs. 



336 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

For the most part, indeed, Hobbes's Iliad and Odyssey are no 
better than travesties of Homer's, the more ludicrous as being un- 
designed and unconscious. Never was there a more signal re- 
venge than that v^hich Hobbes afforded to imagination and poetry 
over his own unbelieving and scoffing philosophism by the publi- 
cation of this work. It was almost as if the man born blind, who 
had all his lifetime been attempting to prove that the sense which 
he himself wanted was no sense at all, and that that thing, colour, 
which it professed peculiarly to discern, was a mere delusion, 
should ha\'e himself at last taken the painter's brush and pallet in 
hand, and attempted, in confirmation of his theor}-, to produce a 
picture by the mere senses of touch, taste, smell, and hearing.* 



Nevile. 

The most remarkable treatise on political philosophy which 
appeared in the interval between the Eestoration and the Eevo- 
lution is Henry Nevile's Plato Eedivivus, or a Dialogue concern- 
ing Government; which was first published in 1681, and went 
through at least a second edition the same year. Nevile, who 
was born in 1620, and survived till 1694, had in the earlier part 
of his life been (closely connected with Harrington, the author of 
the Oceana, and also with the founders of the Commonwealth, 
and he is commonly reckoned a republican writer ; but the 
present work professes to advocate a monarchical form of govern- 
ment. Its leading principle is the same as that on which Har- 
rington's work is founded, the necessity of all stable government 
being based upon property ; but, in a Preface, in the form of an 
Address from the Publisher to the Eeader, pains are taken to 
show that the author's application of this principle is different 
from Harrington's. It is observed, in the first place, that the 
principle in question is not exclusively or originally Harring- 
ton's ; it had been discoursed upon and maintained in very many 
treatises and pamphlets before ever the Oceana came out ; in 
particular in A Letter from an Officer in Ireland to His Highness 
the Lord Protector, printed in 1653, "which was more than three 
years before Oceana was written." Besides, continues the writer, 

* It is right, however, to state that Coleridge, in a note to the second 
(1819) edition of the Friend, Introd. Essay iv., admits that in the original 
edition of that work he had spoken too contemptuously of Hobbes's Odyssey, 
whicli when he so wrote of it he had not seen. "It is doubtless," he adds, 
*' as much too ballad-like as the later versions are too epic ; but still, on the 
whole, it leaves a much truer impression of the original." 



CUDWORTH ; MORE. 837 

wlio is evidently Nevile himself, '' Oceana was written (it being 
thought lawful so to do in those times) to evince out of these 
principles that England was not capable of any other government 
than a democracy. And this author, out of the same maxims or 
aphorisms of politics, endeavours to prove that they may be 
applied, naturally and fitly, to the redressing and supporting one 
of the best monarchies in the world, which is that of England." 
The tenor of the work is throughout in conformity with this 
declaration. 



Other Prose Writers: — Cud worth, More; Barrow; Bunyan; &c. 

The most illustrious antagonist of metaphysical Hobbism, 
when first promulgated, was Dr. Ealph Cudworth, the First Part 
of whose True Intellectual System of the Universe, wherein all 
the Eeason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted, was first 
published in 1678. As a vast storehouse of learning, and also as 
a display of wonderful powers of subtle and far-reaching specu- 
lation, this celebrated work is almost unrivalled in our literature ; 
and it is also written in a style of elastic strength and compass 
which places its author in a high rank among our prose classics. 
Along with Cudworth may be mentioned his friend and brother 
Platonist, Dr. Henry More, the author of numerous theological 
and philosophical works, and remarkable for the union of some 
of the most mystic notions with the clearest style, and of the 
most singular credulity with powers of reasoning of the highest 
order. Other two great theological writers of this age were the 
voluminous Eichard Baxter and the learned and eloquent Dr. 
Eobert Leighton, Archbishop of Glasgow, " Baxter," says 
Bishop Burnet, " was a man of great piety ; and, if he had not 
meddled in too many things, would have been esteemed one of 
the learned men of the age. He writ near two hundred books ; 
of these three are large folios : he had a very moving and 
pathetical way of writing, and was his whole life long a man of 
great zeal and much simplicity ; but was most unhappily subtle 
and metaphysical in everything."* Of Leighton, whom he 
knew intimately, the same writer has given a much more copious 
account, a few sentences of which we will transcribe : — " His 
preaching had a sublimity both of thought and expression in it. 
The grace and gravity of his pronunciation was such that few 
heard him without a very sensible emotion. ... It was so 
different from all others, and indeed from everything that one 
* Own Time, i. 180. 



338 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

could hope to rise up to, that it gave a man an indignation at 
himself and all others. . . . His style was rather too fine ; hut 
there was a majesty and beauty in it that left so deep an im- 
pression that I cannot yet forget the sermons I heard him preach 
thirty years ago."* The writings of Archbishop Leighton that 
have come down to us have been held by some of the highest 
minds of our own day — Coleridge for one — to bear out Burnet's 
aifectionate panegyric. But perhaps the greatest genius among 
the theological writers of this age was the famous Dr. Isaac 
Barrow, popularly known chiefly by his admirable Sermons, but 
renowned also in the history of modern science as, next to 
Newton himself, the greatest mathematician of his time. " As a 
writer," the late Professor Dugald Stewart has well said of 
Barrow, " he is equally distinguished by the redundancy of his 
matter and by the pregnant brevity of his expression ; but what 
more peculiarly characterizes his manner is a ceii:ain air of 
powerful and of conscious facility in the execution of whatever 
he undertakes. Whether the subject be mathematical, meta- 
physical, or theological, he seems always to bring to it a mind 
which feels itself superior to the occasion, and which, in con- 
tending with the greatest difficulties, puts forth but half its 
strength. He has somewhere spoken of his Lectiones Mathe- 
maticee (which it may, in passing, be remarked, display meta- 
physical talents of the highest order) as extemporaneous effusions 
of his pen ; and I have no doubt that the same epithet is still 
more literally applicable to his pulpit discourses. It is, indeed, 
only thus that we can account for the variety and extent of his 
voluminous remains, when we recollect that the author died at 
the age of forty-six."! But the name that in popular cele- 
brity transcends all others, among the theological writers of 
this age, is that of John Bunyan, the author of various religious 
works, and especially of the Pilgrim's Progress. One critic 
has in our time had the courage to confess in print, that to him 
this famous allegory appeared " mean, jejune, and wearisome." 
Our late brilliant essayist, Lord Macaulay, on the other hand, in 
a paper published in 1880, has written: — " Y/e are not afraid 
to say, that, though there were many clever men in England 
during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were 
only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a 
very eminent degree. One of those minds produced the 
Paradise Lost, the other the Pilgrim's Progress."' And, to the 

* Own Time, i. 135. 

t Dissertation on the Progress of Philosophy, p. 45. 



BTJNYAN. 339 

end of liis life, we find him faithful to the same enthusiasm.* 
He conceives it to be the characteristic peculiarity of the Pil- 
grim's Progress " that it is the only work of its kind which 
possesses a strong human interest." The pilgrimage of the great 
Italian poet through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is of course 
regarded as not properly an allegory. But high poetry is 
treated somewhat unceremoniously throughout this paper. Of 
the Eaiiy Queen it is said: — " Of the persons who read the 
first canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first book, and 
not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very 
few and very weary are those who are in at the death of the 
Blatant Beast. If the last six books, which are said to have 
been destroyed in Ireland, had been preserved, we doubt whether 
any heart less stout than that of a commentator would have held 
out to the end." It must be admitted that, as a story, the 
Pilgrim's Progress is a great deal more interesting than the 
Fairy Queen. And we suspect that, if we are to take the verdict 
of the most numerous class of readers, it will carry off the palm 
quite as decidedly from the Paradise Lost. Yery few, com- 
paratively, and very weary, we apprehend, are the readers of 
that great poem, too, who bave made their way steadily through 
it from the beginning of the First Book to the end of the Twelfth. 
Still, although Bunyan had undoubtedly an ingenious, shaping, 
and vivid imagination, and his work, partly from its execution, 
partly from its subject, takes a strong hold, as Macaulay has well 
pointed out, of minds of xerj various kinds, commanding the 
admiration of the most fastidious critics, such, for instance, as 
Doctor Johnson, while it is loved by those who are too simple to 
admire it, we must make a great distinction between the power 
by which such general attraction as this is produced and what 
we have in the poetiy of Milton and Spenser. The difference is 
something of the same kind with that which exists between any 
fine old popular ballad and a tragedy of Sophocles or of Shake- 
speare. Bunyan could rhyme too, when he chose; but be has 
plenty of poetry without that, and we cannot agree with the 
opinion expressed by good Adam Clarke, " that the Pilgrim's 
Progress would be more generally read, and more abundantly 
useful to a particular class of readers, were it turned into decent 
rhyme." We suspect the ingenious gentleman, who, in the 
early part of the last century, published an edition of Paradise 
Lost turned into prose, had a more correct notion of what would 

* See tlie Paper on Eanke's History of tlie Popes (1840) ; and again the 
lively, though slight, sketch of Bunyan s history in the Biographies. 



340 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

be most useful, and also most agreeable, to a pretty mimerous 
class of readers. 

What Lord Macaulay says of Bnnyan's English, though his 
estimate is, perhaps, a little high-pitched, is worth quoting : — 
" The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable 
as a study to every person vt^ho wishes to obtain a wide com- 
mand over the English language. The vocabulary is the voca- 
bulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we 
except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle 
the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do 
not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no 
writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For mag- 
nificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle dis- 
quisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the 
divine, this homely dialect, the dialect of plain working men, 
was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our literature on 
which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted 
English language, no book which shows so well how rich that 
language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been 
improved by all that it has borrowed." 

To the names that have been mentioned may be added those 
of Izaak Walton, the mild-tempered angler and biographer ; Sir 
William Temple, the lively, agreeable, and well-informed essayist 
and memoirist ; and many others that might be enumerated if it 
were our object to compile a catalogue instead of noticing only 
the principal lights of our literature. 



341 



ENGLISH LITEEATUEE SINCE THE EEYOLUTION OF 

1688. 



First Effects of the Eevolution on our Literature. 

The Eevolution, brought on by some of the same causes that had 
given birth to the Commonwealth, and restoring something of 
the same spirit and condition of things, came like another nightfall 
upon our higher literature, putting out the light of poetry in the 
land still more effectually than had even that previous triumph of 
the popular principle. Up to this date English literature had 
grown and flourished chiefly in the sunshine of court protection 
and favour ; the public appreciation and sympathy were not yet 
sufficiently extended to afford it the necessary warmth and 
shelter. Its spirit, consequently, and affections were in the 
main courtly ; it drooped and withered when the encouragement 
of the court was withdrawn, from the deprivation both of its 
customary support and sustenance and of its chief inspiration. 
And, if the decay of this kind of light at the Eevolution was, as 
we have said, still more complete than that which followed upon 
the setting up of the Commonwealth, the difference seems to have 
been mainly owing to there having been less of it to extinguish 
at the one epoch than at the other. At the Eestoration the 
impulse given by the great poets of the age of Elizabeth and 
James was yet operating, without having been interrupted and 
weakened by any foreign influence, upon the language and the 
national mind. Doubtless, too, whatever may be thought of the 
literary tendencies of puritanism and republicanism when they 
had got into the ascendant, the nurture both for head and heart 
furnished by the ten years of high deeds, and higher hopes and 
speculations, that ushered in the Commonwealth, must have been 
of a far other kind than any that was to be got out of the thirty 
years, or thereby, of laxity, frivolity, denationalization, and in- 
sincerity of all sorts, down the comparatively smooth stream of 
which men slid, without effort and without thought, to the 
Eevolution. No wonder that some powerful minds were trained 
by the former, and almost none by the latter. 



342 ENGLISH LITEK-ATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Surviving Writers of the preceding Period. 

With, tlie exception of some two or three names, none of tliem 
of the highest class, to be presently mentioned, almost the only 
writers that shed anj lustre on the first reign after the Ee volu- 
tion are those of a few of the survivors of the preceding era. 
Dryden, fallen on what to him were evil days and evil tongues, 
and forced in his old age to write for bread with less rest for his 
wearied head and hand than they had ever had before, now pro- 
duced some of his most laborious and also some of his most 
happily executed works : his translation of Yirgil, among others, 
his Fables, and his Alexander's Feast. Lee, the dramatic poet, 
discharged from Bedlam, finished two more tragedies, his Princess 
of Cleve and his Massacre of Paris, before, " returning one night 
from the Bear and Harrow, in Butcher-Eow, through Claie Market, 
to his lodgings in Duke Street, overladen with wine, he fell down 
on the ground as some say, according to others on a bulk, and 
was killed or stifled in the snow," early in the year 1692. The 
comic Etheredge also outlived the deposition of his patron 
James II., but is not known to have written anything after that 
event ; he followed James to France, and is reported to have died 
characteristically at Eatisbon a year or two after : " having 
treated some company with a liberal entertainment at his house 
there, where he had taken his glass too freely, and, being, 
through his great complaisance, too forward in waiting on his 
guests at their departure, flushed as he was, he tumbled down 
stairs and broke his neck, and so fell a martyr to jollity and 
civility." Wycherley, v\^ho at the date of the Eevolution was 
under fifty, lived to become a correspondent of Pope, and even 
saw out the reign of Anne ; but he produced nothing in that of 
William, although he published a volume of poems in 1704, and 
left some other trifles behind him, which were printed long after- 
wards by Theobald. Southerne, indeed, who survived till 1746, 
continued to write and publish till v/ithin twenty years of his 
death ; his two best dramas — his Fatal Marriage and his Oroo- 
noko— were both produced in the reign of William. Southerne, 
though not without considerable pathetic power, was fortunate in 
a genius on the whole not above the appreciation of the unpoeti- 
cal age he lived in : '' Dryden once took occasion to ask him hov/ 
much he got by one of his plays ; to which he answered that he 
was really ashamed to inform him. But, Mr. Dryden being a 
little importunate to know, he plainly told him that by his last 
play he cleared seven hundred pounds, which appeared astonish- 
ing to Dryden, as he himself had never been able to acquire more 



SURVIVING WRITERS OF THE PRECEDING PERIOD. 343 

than one hundred' by his most successful pieces."* Southerne, 
who, whatever estimate may be formed of his poetry, was not, we 
may gather from this anecdote, without some conscience and 
modesty, had worse writers than himself to keep him in counte- 
nance by their preposterous prosperity, in this lucky time for 
mediocrity and dulness. Shadwell was King William's first poet- 
laureate, and Nahum Tate his next. Tate, indeed, and his friend 
Dr. Nicholas Brady, were among the most flourishing authors 
and greatest public favourites of this reign : it was now that they 
perpetrated in concert their version, or perversion, of the Psalms, 
with which we are still afflicted. Brady also published a play, 
and, at a later date, some volumes of sermons and a translation of 
the iEneid, which, fortunately, not having been imposed or re- 
commended by authority, are all among the most forgotten of 
books. Elkanah Settle, too, was provided for as City poet. 

Among writers of another class, perhaps the most eminent who, 
having been distinguished before the Ee volution, survived and 
continued to write after that event, was Sir William Temple, 
His Miscellanies, by which he is principally known, though 
partly composed before, were not published till then. John 
Evelyn, who, however, although a very miscellaneous as well as 
voluminous writer, has hardly left any work that is held in esteem 
for either style or thought, or for anything save what it may 
contain of positive information or mere matter of fact, also pub- 
lished one or two books in the reign of William, which he saw to 
an end; for he died at the age of eighty-five, in 1706. Bishop 
Stillingfleet, who had been known as an author since before the 
Restoration, for his Irenicnm appeared in 1659, when he was only 
in his twenty-fourth year, and who had kept the press in employ- 
ment by a rapid succession of publications during the next five- 
and-twenty years, resumed his pen after the Eevolution, which 
raised him to the bench, to engage in a controversy with Locke 
about some of the principles of his famous essay ; but, whether 
it was that years had abated his powers, or that he had a worse 
cause to defend, or merely that the public taste was changed, he 
gained much less applause for his dialectic skill on this than on 
most former occasions. Stillingfleet lived to the year 1699. 

John Norris, also, one of the last of the school of English Pla- 
tonists, which may be considered as having been founded in the 
latter part of the seventeenth century by Cudworth and Henry 
More, had, we believe, become known as a writer some years be- 
fore the Revolution ; but the greater number of his publications 
first appeared in the reign of William, and he may be reckoned 
* Biog. Dram. 



344 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

one of the best writers properly or principally belonging to that 
reign. Yet he is not for a moment to be compared for learning, 
compass of thought, or power and skill of expression, to either 
Cudworth or More. Norris's principal work is his Essay on the 
Ideal World, published in two parts in 1701 and 1702. He is 
also the author of a volume of religious poetry, of rather a feeble 
character, which has been often reprinted. Bishop Spratt, though 
a clergyman, and a writer both of prose and verse, cannot be 
called a divine ; he had in earlier life the reputation of being the 
finest writer of the day, but, although he lived till very nearly 
the end of the reign of Anne, he published nothing, we believe, 
after the Revolution, nor indeed for a good many years before it. 
His style, which was so much admired in his own age, is a 
Frenchified English, with an air of ease and occasionally of viva- 
city, but without any true grace or expressiveness. 

Good old Richard Baxter, who had been filling the world with 
books for half a century, just lived to see the Revolution. He 
died, at the age of seventy-six, in the beginning of December, 
1691. And in the end of the same month died, a considerabl}^- 
younger man, Robert Boyle, another of the most voluminous 
writers of the preceding period, and famous also for his services 
in the cause of religion, as well as of science. In the preceding 
May, at a still less advanced age, had died the most eminent 
Scotch writer of the period between the Restoration and the 
Revolution, Sir George Mackenzie, lord-advocate under both 
Charles II. and his successor; the author of the Institution of 
the Laws of Scotland, and many other professional, historical, 
and antiquarian works, but the master also of a flowing pen in 
moral speculation, the belles lettres, and even in the department 
of fancy and fiction— ^as may be gathered from the titles of his 
Aretina, or the Serious Romance, 1660 ; Religio Stoici, or the 
Virtuoso, 1663 ; Solitude preferred to Public Employment, 1665 ; 
Moral Gallantry, 1667. Mackenzie may be regarded as the first 
successor of his countrjnnan Drummond of Hawthornden in the 
cultivation of an English style; he was the correspondent of 
Dryden and other distinguished English writers of his day ; but 
he has no pretensions of his own to any high rank either for the 
graces of his expression or the value of his matter. Whatever 
may have been his professional learning, too, his historical dis- 
quisitions are as jejune and uncritical as his attempts at fine 
writing are, with all their elaboration, at once pedantic and 
clownish. He has nothing either of the poetry or the elegance 
of Drummond. 



345 



Bishop Burnet. 



The most active and conspicuous undoubtedly of the prose 
writers who, having acquired distinction in the preceding period, 
continued to prosecute the business of authorship after the Eevo- 
lution, was the celebrated Dr. Gilbert Burnet, now Bishop of 
Salisbury. Of 145 distinct publications (many of them, however, 
only single sermons and other short pamphlets), which are enu- 
merated as having proceeded from his incessant pen between 1669 
and his death, at the age of seventy-two, in 1716 (including, in- 
deed, his History of his Own Time, and his I'houghts on Educa- 
tion, which did not appear till after his death), we find that 71, 
namely 21 historical works and 50 sermons and tracts, belong to 
the period before the Eevolution; 36, namely 5 historical works 
and 31 sermons and tracts, to the reign of Yv illiam ; and the re- 
maining 38, namely one historical work and 37 pamphlets, to 
a later date. Many of what we have called historical works, 
however, are mere pamphlets : in fact Burnet's literary perform- 
ances of any considerable extent are only three in number : — his 
Memoirs of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton, published, 
in one volume folio, in 1676 ; his History of the Eeformation of 
the Church of England, 3 volumes folio, 1679, 1681, and 1714; 
and his History of his Own Time, in two volumes folio, published 
after his death in 1723 and 1734. There is enough of literary 
labour, as w^ell as of historical value, in these works to preserve 
to the author a very honourable name ; each of them contains 
much matter now nowhere else to be found, and they must al- 
ways continue to rank among the original sources of our national 
history, both ecclesiastical and civil. In regard to their execu- 
tion, too, it must be admitted that the style is at least straight- 
forward and unaffected, and generally as unambiguous as it is 
unambitious ; the facts are clearly enough arranged ; and the 
story is told not only intelligibly, but for the most part in rather 
a lively and interesting way. On the other hand, to any high 
station as a writer Burnet can make no claim ; he is an indus- 
trious collector of intelligence, and a loquacious and moderately 
lively gossip : but of eloquence, or grace, or refinement of any 
sort, he is as destitute as he is (and that is altogether) of imagi- 
nation, and wit, and humour, and subtlety, and depth and weight 
of thought, and whatever other qualities give anything either of 
life or lustre to what a man utters out of his own head or heart. 
We read him for the sake of his facts only ; he troubles us with 
but few reflections, but of that no reader will complain. He 
does not see far into anything, nor indeed, properly speaking, 



346 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

into it at all ; for that matter he is little more, to adopt a modern 
term, than a penny-a-liner on a large scale, and best performs his 
task when he does not attempt to be anything else. Nor is he a 
neat-handed workman even of that class ; in his History of his 
Own Time, in particular, his style, with no strength, or flavour, 
or natural charm of any kind, to redeem its rudeness, is the most 
slovenly undress in which a writer ever wrapt up what he had to 
communicate to the public. Its only merit, as we have observed, 
is Ihat it is without any air of pretension, and that it is evi- 
dently as extemporaneous and careless as it is unelevated, shape- 
less, and ungrammatical. Among the most important and best 
known of Burnet's other works are, that entitled Some Passages 
of the Life and Death of the Eight Honourable John Wilmot, 
Earl of Kochester, 1680 ; his Life of Bishop Bedel, 1685 ; his 
Travels through France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, 1685 ; 
and his Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, 1699. The first 
mentioned of these is the best written of all his works. 



Thomas Burnet. 

In the same year with Bishop Burnet, but at a more advanced 
age, died Dr. Thomas Burnet, the learned and eloquent author of 
the Telluris Sacra Theoria, first published in Latin in 1680, and 
afterwards translated into English by the author ; of the Archseo- 
logia Philosophica, published in 1692; and of two or three other 
treatises, also in Latin, which did not appear till after his death. 
Burnet's system of geology has no scientific value whatever ; 
indeed, it must be considered as a mere romance, although, from 
the earnestness of the author's manner and his constant citation 
of texts of Scripture in support of his positions, as well as from 
more than one answer which he afterwards published to the 
attacks made upon his book, it is evident that he by no means 
intended it to be so received. But, with his genius and imagi- 
nation and consummate scholarship, he is a very different species 
of writer from his garrulous and mitred namesake : his English 
style is singularly flowing and harmonious, as well as per- 
spicuous and animated, and rises on fit occasions to much majesty 
and even splendour. 



Other Theological Writers : — Tillotson ; South. 

Another name that may be here mentioned is that of Arch- 
bishop Tillotson, who was a very popular preacher among the 



TJLLOTSON ; SOUTH. 347 

Presbyterians before tbe Eestoration, and began publishing 
sermons so early as in the year 1661, while he still belonged to 
that sect. He died in 1694, in his sixty-fourth jea,r, Tillotson's 
Sermons, still familiarly known by reputation, long continued to 
be the most generally esteemed collection of such compositions in 
the language ; but are probably now very little read. They are 
substantial performances, such as make the reader feel, when he 
has got through one of them, that he has accomplished something 
of a feat ; and, being withal as free from pedantry and every 
other kind of eccentricity or extravagance as from flimsiness, and 
exceedingly sober in their strain of doctrine, with a certain blunt 
cordiality in the expression and manner, they were in all re- 
spects very happily addressed to the ordinary peculiarities of the 
national mind and character. But, having once fallen into 
neglect, Tillotson's writings have no qualities that will ever 
revive attention to them. There is much more of a true vitality 
in the sermons of Dr. Robert South, whose career of authorship 
commenced in the time of the Protectorate, though his life was 
extended till after the accession of George I. He died in 1716, 
at the age of eighty-three. South's sermons, the first of which 
dates even before the earliest of Tillotson's, and the last after 
Tillotson's latest, are Yerj well characterised by Mr. Hallam : — 
" They were," he observes, " much celebrated at the time, and 
retain a portion of their renown. This is b}^ no means surpris- 
ing. South had great qualifications for that popularity which 
attends the pulpit, and his manner was at that time original. 
Not diffuse, nor learned, nor formal in argument like Barrow, 
with a more natural structure of sentences, a more pointed though 
by no means a more fair and satisfactory turn of reasoning, with 
a style clear and English, free from all pedantry, but abounding 
with those colloquial novelties of idiom, which, though now be- 
come vulgar and offensive, the age of Charles II. affected, sparing 
no personal or temporary sarcasm, but, if he seems for a moment 
to tread on the verge of buffoonery, recovering himself by some 
stroke of vigorous sense and language : such was the worthy 
Dr. South, whom the courtiers delighted to hear. His sermons 
want all that is called unction, and sometimes even earnestness ; 
but there is a masculine spirit about them, which, combined with 
their peculiar characteristics, would naturally fill the churches 
where he might be heard."* Both South and Tillotson are con- 
sidered to belong as divines to the Arminian, or, as it was then 
commonly called, the Latitu dinar ian school — as well as Cudworth, 
More, and Stillingfleet. 

* Lit. of Europe, iv. 56, 



348 ENGLISH LITERATURE AKD LANGUAGE. 

Locke. 

The only considerable literary name tliat belongs exclusively, 
or almost exclnsively, to the first reign after the Revolution is 
that of Locke. John Locke, born in 1632, although his Adver- 
sariorum Methodus, or New Method of a Common-Place-Book, 
had appeared in French in Leclerc's Bibliotheque for 1686, and 
an abridgment of his celebrated Essay, and his first Letter on 
Toleration, both also in French, in the same publication for 1687 
and 1688, had published nothing in English, or with his name, 
till he produced in 1690 the work which has ever since made him 
one of the best known of English writers, both in his own and 
in other countries, his Essay concerning Human Understanding. 
This was followed by his Second Letter on Toleration, and his 
two Treatises on Government, in the same year ; his Considera- 
tions on Lowering the Interest of Money, in 1691 ; his Third 
Letter on Toleration, in 1692; his Thoughts concerning Educa- 
tion, in 1693; his Reasonableness of Christianity, in 1695; and 
various controversial tracts in reply to his assailants, Dr. Edwards 
and Bishop Stillingfleet, between that date and his death in 1704. 
After his death appeared his Conduct of the Understanding, and 
several theological treatises, the composition of which had been 
the employment of the last years of his industrious and produc- 
tive old age. Locke's famous Essay was the first work, perhaps 
in any language, which professedly or systematically attempted 
to popularise metaphysical philosophy. It is the first comprehen- 
sive survey that had been attempted of the whole mind and its 
faculties; and the very conception of such a design argued an 
intellect of no common reach, originality, and boldness. It will 
remain also of very considerable value as an extensive register of 
facts, and a storehouse of acute and often suggestive observations 
on psychological phenomena, whatever may be the fate of the 
views propounded in it as aspiring to constitute a metaphysical 
system. Further, it is not to be denied that this work has 
exercised a powerful influence upon the course of philosophical 
inquiry and opinion ever since its appearance. At first, in par- 
ticular, it did good service in putting finally to the rout some 
fantastic notions and methods that still lingered in the schools ; 
it was the loudest and most comprehensive proclamation that had 
yet been made of the liberation of philosophy from ihe dominion 
of authority ; but Locke's was a mind stronger and better fur- 
nished for the work of pulling down than of building up : he had 
enough of clearsightedness and independence of mental character 
for the one ; whatever endowments of a different kind he pos- 



SWIFT. 349 

sessed, lie had too little imagination, or creative power, for the 
other. Besides, the very passionless character of his mind would 
have unfitted him for going far into the philosophy of our 
complex nature, in which the passions are the revealers and 
teachers of all the deepest truths, and alone afibrd us any intima- 
tion of many things which, even with the aid of their lurid light, 
we discern but as fearful and unfathomable mysteries. What 
would Shakespeare's understanding of the philosophy of human 
nature have been, if he had had no more imagination and passion 
in his own nature than Locke ? 



Swift. 

His renowned Tale of a Tub and a tract entitled The Battle 
of the Books, published together in 1704, were the first announce- 
ment of the greatest master of satire at once comic and caustic 
that has yet appeared in our language. Swift, born in Dublin in 
1667, had already, in the last years of the reign of King William, 
made himself known by two volumes of Letters selected from 
the papers of his friend Temple (who died in 1699), and also by 
a political pamphlet in favour of the ministry of the day, which 
attracted little notice, and gave as little promise of his future 
eminence as a writer. To politics as well as satire, however, he 
adhered throughout his career — often blending the two, but pro- 
ducing scarcely anything, if we may not except some of his 
effusions in verse, that was not either satirical or political. 
His course of authorship as a political writer may be considered 
properly to begin with his Letter concerning the Sacramental 
Test, and another high Tory and high Church tract, which he 
published in 1708; in which same year he also came forward 
with his ironical Argument for the Abolition of Christianity, 
and, in his humorous Predictions first assumed his nom de guerre 
of Isaac Bickerstafi", Esquire, subsequently made so famous by 
other jmx d' esprit in the same style, and by its adoption soon 
after by the wits of the Tatler. Of his other most notable per- 
formances, his Conduct of the Allies was published in 1712; his 
Public Spirit of the Whigs, in 1714; his Drapier's Letters, in 
1724; his immortal Gulliver's Travels, in 1727; and his Polite 
Conversation, which, however, had been written many years 
before, in 1738. His poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, besides, 
had appeared, without his consent, in 1723, soon after the death 
of Miss Hester Yanhomrigh, its heroine. The History of the 
Four Last Years of Queen Anne (if his, which there can hardly 



350 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

be a doubt that it is), the Directions for Servants, many of his 
verses and other shorter pieces, and his Diary written to Stella 
(Miss Johnson, whom he eventually married), were none of them 
printed till after, some of them not till long after, his death, 
which took place in 1745. 

" thou!" exclaims his friend Pope, 

" whatever title please thine ear, 

Dean, Drapier, Bickers taff, or Gulliver ! 

Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air, 

Or laugh and shake in Kabelais' easy chair, 

Or praise the court, or magnify mankind, 

Or thy grieved country's copper chains unbind," — 

lines that describe comprehensively enough the celebrated dean's 
genius and writings — what he did and what he was. And the 
first remark to be made about Swift is, that into everything that 
came from his pen he put a strong infusion of himself ; that in 
his writings we read the man — ^not merely his intellectual ability, 
but his moral nature, his passions, his principles, his prejudices, 
his humours, his whole temper and individuality. The common 
herd of writers have no individuality at all ; those of the ver}'' 
highest class can assume at will any other individuality as per- 
fectly as their own — they have no exclusiveness. Next under 
this highest class stand those whose individuality is at once 
their strength and their weakness ; — their strength, inasmuch 
as it distinguishes them from and lifts them far above the multi- 
tude of writers of mere talent or expository skill ; their weakness 
and bondage, in that it will not be thrown off, and that it with- 
holds them from ever going out of themselves, and rising from 
the merely characteristic, striking, or picturesque, either to the 
dramatic or to the beautiful, of both of which equally the spirit is 
unegotistic and universal. To this class, which is not the 
highest but the next to it. Swift belongs. The class, however, 
like both that which is above and that which is below it, is one 
of wide comprehension, and includes many degrees of power, and 
even many diversities of gifts. Swift was neither a Cei-vantes 
nor a Eabelais ; but yet, with something that was peculiar to 
himself, he combined considerable portions of both. He had 
more of Cervantes than Eabelais had, and more of Eabelais than 
was given to Cervantes. There cannot be claimed for him the 
refinement, the humanity, the pathos, the noble elevation of the 
Spaniard — all that irradiates and beautifies his satire and drollery 
as the blue sky does the earth it bends over ; neither, with all his 
ingenuity and fertility, does our English wit and humouiist 



SWIFT. 351 

anywhere display eitiier the same inexhaustible abundance of 
grotesque invention, or the same gaiety and luxuriance of fancy, 
with the historian of the Doings and Sayings of the Giant Gar- 
gantua. Yet neither Ceiwantes nor Eabelais, nor both combined, 
could have written the Tale of a Tub. The torrent of triumphant 
merriment is broader and more rushing than anything of the 
same kind in either. When we look indeed to the perfection 
and exactness of the allegory at all pomts, to the biting sharp- 
ness and at the same time the hilarity and comic animation of 
the satire, to its strong and unpausing yet easy and natural flow, 
to the incessant blaze of the wit and humoiu-, and to the style 
so clear, so vivid and expressive, so idiomatic, so English, so 
true and appropriate in all its varieties, narrative, didactic, rhe- 
torical, colloquial, as we know no work of its class in our own 
lang-uage that as a whole approaches this, so we doubt if there be 
another quite equal to it in any language. 

Swift was undoubtedly the most masculine intellect of his age, 
the most earnest thinker of a time in which there was less among 
us of earnest and deep thinking than in any other era of our lite- 
ratui'e. In its later and more matured form, his wit itself becomes 
earnest and passionate, and has a severity, a fierceness, a sceva in- 
dignatio, that are all his otvti, and that have never been blended in 
an}^ other writer with so keen a perception of the ludicrous and 
so much general comic power. The breath of his rich, pungent, 
original jocularity is at the same time cutting as a sword and con- 
suming as fire. Other masters of the same art are satisfied if they 
can only made their readers laugh; this is their main, often their 
sole aim : with Swift, to excite the emotion of the ludicrous is, 
in most of his writings, only a subordinate purpose, — a means 
employed for effecting quite another and a much higher end ; if 
he labours to make anything ridiculous, it is because he hates 
it, and would have it trodden into the earth or extirpated. This, 
at least, became the settled temper of all the middle and latter 
jDortion of his life. No sneaking kindness for his victim is to be 
detected in his crucifying raillery ; he is not a mere admirer of 
the comic picturesque, w^ho will sometimes rack or gibbet an un- 
happy individual for the sake of the fantastic grimaces he may 
make, or the capers he may cut in the air ; he has the true spirit 
of an executioner, and only loves his joke as sauce and seasoning 
to more serious work. Few men have been more perversely pre- 
judiced and self-willed than Swift, and therefore of absolute truth 
his works may probably contain less than many others not so 
earnestly written ; but of what was truth to the mind of the 
writer, of what he actually believed and desired, no works con- 



352 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

tain more. Here, again, as well as in the other respect noticed 
some pages back, Swift is in the middle class of writers ; far above 
those whose whole truth is truth of expression — that is, corre- 
spondence between the words and the thoughts (possibly with- 
out any between the thoughts and the writer's belief) ; but 
below those who both write what they think, and whose thoughts 
are pre-eminently valuable for their intrinsic beauty or profound- 
ness. Yet in setting honestly and effectively before us even his 
own passions and prejudices a writer also tells us the truth — the 
truth, at least, respecting himself, if not respecting anything else. 
This much Swift does always ; and this is his great distinction 
among the masters of wit and humour ; — the merriest of his jests 
is an utterance of some real feeling of his heart at the moment, 
as much as the fiercest of his invectives. Alas ! with all his jest- 
ing and merriment, he did not know what it was to have a mind 
at ease, or free from the burden and torment of dark, devouring 
joassions, till, in his own words, the cruel indignation that tore 
continually at his heart was laid at rest in the grave. In truth, 
the insanity which ultimately fell down upon and laid prostrate 
his fine faculties had cast something of its black shadow athwart 
their vision from the first — as he himself probably felt or sus- 
pected when he determined to bequeath his fortune to build an 
hospital in his native country for persons afflicted with that 
calamity ; and sad enough, we may be sure, he was at heart, when 
he gaily wrote that he did so merely 

To show, by one satiric touch, 
No nation wanted it so much.* 

Yet the madness, or predisposition to madness, was also part and 
parcel of the man, and possibly an element of his genius — which 
might have had less earnestness and force, as well as less activity, 
productiveness, and originality, if it had not been excited and 
impelled by that perilous fervour. Nay, something of their 
power and peculiar character Swift's writings may owe to the 
exertions called forth in curbing and keeping down the demon 
which, like a proud steed under a stout rider, would have 
mastered him, if he had not mastered it, and, although support 
and strengtli to him so long as it was held in subjection, would, 

* '* I liave often," says Lord Orrery, " heard Mm lament the state of child- 
hood and idiotism to which some of the greatest men of this nation were 
reduced before their death. He mentioned, as examples within his own 
time, the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Somers ; and, when he cited these 
melancholy instances, it was always with a heavy sigh, and with gestures that 
showed great uneasiness, as if he felt an impulse of what was to happen to 
him before he died." — Remarks, p. 188. 



POPE. 353 

dominant over him, have rent him in pieces, as in the end it did. 
Few could have maintained the struggle so tonghly and so long. 

Swift would probably have enjoyed a higher reputation as a 
poet if he had not been so great a writer in prose. His produc- 
tions in verse are considerable in point of quantity, and many of 
them admirable of their kind. But those of them that deserve to 
be so described belong to the humblest kind of poetry — to that 
kind which has scarcely any distinctively poetical quality or 
characteristic about it except the rhyme. He has made some 
attempts in a higher style, but with little success. Ills Pindaric 
Odes, written and published when he was a young man, drew 
from Drs^den (who was his relation) the emphatic judgment, 
" Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet :" and, though Swift, 
never forgave this frankness, he seems to have felt that the 
prognostication was a sound one, for he wrote no more Pindaric 
Odes. Nor indeed did he ever afterwards attempt anything 
considerable in the way of serious poetry, if we except his 
Cadenus and Vanessa (the story of Miss Vanhomrigh), his 
effusion entitled Poetry, a Ehapsody, and that on his own death 
— and even these are chiefly distinguished from his other pro- 
ductions by being longer and more elaborate, the most elevated 
portions of the first mentioned scarcely rising above narrative 
and reflection, and whatever there is of more dignified or solemn 
writing in the two others being largely intermixed with comedy 
and satire in his usual easy ambling style. With all his liveli- 
ness of fancy, he had no grandeur of imagination, as little feeling 
of the purely graceful or beautiful, no capacity of tender emotion, 
no sensibility to even the simplest forms of music. With these 
deficiencies it was impossible that he should produce anything 
that could be called poetical in a high sense. But of course he 
could put his wit and fancy into the form of verse — and so as to 
make the measured expression and the rhyme give additional 
point and piquancy to his strokes of satire and ludicrous nar- 
ratives or descriptions. Some of his lighter verses are as good as 
anything of the kind in the language. 



Pope. 

Of Swift's contemporaries, by far the most memorable name is 
that of Alexander Pope. If Swift was at the head of the prose 
writers of the early part of the last century. Pope was as incon- 
testably the first of the writers in verse of that day, with no other 
either equal or second to him. Born a few months before the 

2 A 



354 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Eevolution, lie came forth as a poet, by the publication of his 
Pastorals in Tonson's Miscellany in 1709, when he was yet only 
in his twenty- first year ; and they had been written five years 
before. Nor were they the earliest of his peiformances ; his Ode 
on Solitude, his verses upon Silence,- his translations of the First 
Book of the Thebais and of Ovid's Epistle from Sappho to Phaon, 
and his much more remarkable paraphrases of Chaucer's January 
and May and the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale, all pre- 
ceded the composition of the Pastorals. His Essay on Criticism 
(written in 1709) was published in 1711 ; the Messiah the same 
year (in the Spectator); the Eape of the Lock in 1712; the 
Temple of Fame (written two years before) the same year ; his 
Windsor Forest (which he had commenced at sixteen) in 1713 ; 
the first four books of his translation of the Iliad in 1715 ; his 
Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard (written some years before) we 
believe in 1717, when he published a collected edition of his 
poems ; the remaining portions of the Iliad at different times, the 
last in 1720; his translation of the Odyssey (in concert with 
Fenton and Broome) in 1725; the first three books of the 
Dunciad in 1728; his Essay on Man in 1733 and 1734; his 
Imitations of Horace, various other satirical pieces, the Pro- 
logue and Epilogue to the Satires, his four epistles styled 
Moral Essays, and his modernised version of Donne's Satires 
between 1730 and 1740 ; and the fourth book of the Dunciad in 
1742. Besides all this verse, collections of his Letters were 
published, first surreptitiously by Curl, and then by himself in 
1737; and, among other publications in prose, his clever jez^ 
d'esprit entitled a Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis ap- 
peared in 1713 ; his Preface to Shakespeare, with his edition of 
the works of that poet, in 1721 ; his Treatise of the Bathos, or Art 
of Sinking in Poetry, and his Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of This 
Parish (in ridicule of Burnet's History of his Own Time), in 
1727. He died in May, 1744, about a year and a half before his 
friend Swift, who, more than twenty years his senior, had 
naturally anticipated that he should be the first to depart, and 
that, as he cynically, and yet touchingly too, expressed it, while 
Arbuthnot grieved for him a day, and Gay a week, he should be 
lamented a whole month by "poor Pope," — whom, of all those 
he best knew, he seems to have the most loved. 

Pope, with talent enough for anything, might deserve to be 
ranked among the most distinguished prose writers of his time, 
if he were not its greatest poet ; but it is in the latter character 
that he falls to be noticed in the history of our literature. And 
what a broad and bright region would be cut off fi'om our poetry 



POPE. 355 

if he had never lived ! If we even confine ourselves to his own 
works, without regarding the numerous subsequent writers who 
have formed themselves upon him as an example and model, and 
may be said to constitute the school of which he was the founder, 
how rich an inheritance of brilliant and melodious fancies do we 
not owe to him ! For what would any of us resign the Eape of 
the Lock, or the Epistle of Eloisa, or the Essay on Man, or the 
Moral Essays, or the Satires, or the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, or 
the Dunciad ? That we have nothing in the same style in the 
language to be set beside or weighed against any one of these 
performances will probably be admitted by all ; and, if we could 
say no more, this would be to assign to Pope a rank in our poetic 
literature which certainly not so many as half a dozen other 
names are entitled to share with his. Down to his own day at 
least, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden alone 
had any pretensions to be placed before him or by his side. It 
is unnecessary to dilate upon what has been sufficiently pointed 
out by all the critics, and is too obvious to be overlooked, the 
general resemblance of his poetry, in both its form and spirit, to 
that of Dryden rather than to that of our elder great writers. A 
remarkable external peculiarity of it is, that he is probably the 
only one of our modern poets of eminence who has written 
nothing in blank verse ; while even in rhyme he has nearly 
confined himself to that one decasyllabic line upon which it 
would almost seem to have been his purpose to impress a new 
shape and character. He belongs to the classical school as 
opposed to the romantic, to that in which a French rather than 
to that in which an Italian inspiration may be detected. Whether 
this is to be attributed principally to his constitutional tempera- 
ment and the native character of his imagination, or to the 
influences of the age in which he lived and wrote, we shall not 
stop to inquire. It is enough that such is the fact. But, though 
he may be regarded as in the main the pupil and legitimate suc- 
cessor of Dryden, the amount of what he learned or borrowed 
from that master was by no means so considerable as to prevent 
his manner from having a great deal in it that is distinctive and 
original. If Dryden has more impetuosity and a freer flow, 
Pope has far more delicacy, and, on fit occasions, far more ten 
derness and tnie passion. Dryden has written nothing in the 
same style with the Eape of the Lock on the one hand, or with 
the Epistle to Abelard and the Elegy on the Death of an Unfor- 
tunate Lady on the other. Indeed, these two styles may be said 
to have been both, in so far as the English tongues is concerned, 
invented by Pope. In what preceding writer had he an example 



356 ENGLISH LITERATUKE AND LANGUAGE. 

of either ? Nay, did either tlie French or the Italian language 
furnish him with anything to copy from nearly so brilliant and 
felicitous as his own performances? In the sharper or more 
severe species of satire, again, while in some things he is inferior 
to Dry den, in others he excels him. It must be admitted that 
Dryden's is the nobler, the more generous scorn ; it is passionate, 
while Pope's is frequently only peevish : the one is vehement, 
the other venomous. But, although Pope does not wield the 
ponderous, fervid scourge with which his predecessor tears and 
mangles the luckless object of his indignation or derision, he 
knows how, with a lighter touch, to inflict a torture quite as 
maddening at the moment, and perhaps more difficult to heal. 
Neither has anything of the easy elegance, the simple natural 
grace, the most exquisite artifice simulating the absence of all 
art, of Horace ; but the care, and dexterity, and superior refine- 
ment of Pope, his neatness, and concentration, and point, supply 
a better substitute for these charms than the ruder strength, and 
more turbulent passion, of Dryden. If Dryden, too, has more 
natural fire and force, and rises in his greater passages to a 
stormy grandeur to which the other does not venture to commit 
himself, Pope in some degree compensates for that by a dignity, 
a quiet, sometimes pathetic, majesty, which we find nowhere in 
Dryden's poetry. Dryden has translated the ^neid, and Pope 
the Iliad ; but the two tasks would apparently have been better 
distributed if Dryden had chanced to have taken up Homer, and 
left Virgil to Pope. Pope's Iliad, in truth, whatever may be its 
merits of another kind, is, in spirit and style, about the most 
unhomeric performance in the whole compass of our poetry, as 
Pope had, of all our great poets, the most unhomeric genius. He 
was emphatically the poet of the highly artificial age in which 
he lived ; and his excellence lay in, or at least was fostered and 
perfected by, the accordance of all his tastes and talents, of his 
whole moral and intellectual constitution, with the spirit of that 
condition of things. Not touches of natural emotion, but the 
titillation of wit and fancy, — not tones of natural music, but the 
tone of good society, — make up the charm of his poetry; the 
polish, pungency, and brilliance of which, however, in its most 
happily executed passages leave nothing in that style to be 
desired. Pope, no doubt, wrote with a care and elaboration that 
were nnknown to Dryden ; against whom, indeed, it is a re- 
proach made by his pupil, that, copiouis as he was, he 

wanted or forgot 

The last and greatest art — the art to blot. 



ADDISON AND STEELE. 357 

And so perhaps, althongli tlie expression is a strong and a 
startling one, may the said art, not without some reason, be 
called in reference to the particular species of poetry which 
Dry den and Pope cultivated, dependent as that is for its success 
in pleasing us almost as much upon the absence of faults as upon 
the presence of beauties. Such partial obscuration or distortion 
of the imagery as we excuse, or even admire, in the expanded 
miiTor of a lake reflecting the woods and hills and overhanging 
sky, when its waters are ruffled or swayed by the fitful breeze, 
would be intolerable in a looking-glass, were it otherwise the 
most splendid article of the sort that upholstery every furnished. 



Addison and Steele. 



Next to the prose of Swift and the poetry of Pope, perhaps the 
portion of the literature of the beginning of the last century that 
was both most influential at the time, and still lives most in 
the popular remembrance, is that connected with the names of 
Addison and Steele. These two writers were the chief boast of 
the Whig party, as Swift and Pope were of the Tories. Addison's 
poem, The Campaign, on the victory of Blenheim, his imposing 
but frigid tragedy of Cato, and some other dramatic productions, 
besides various other writings in prose, have given him a repu- 
tation in many departments of literature ; and Steele also holds 
a respectable rank among our comic dramatists as the author of 
the Tender Husband and the Conscious Lovers ; but it is as the 
first, and on the whole the best, of our English essayists, the 
principal authors (in every sense) of the Tatler, the Spectator, 
and the Guardian, that these two wiiters have sent down their 
names with most honour to posterity, and have especially earned 
the love and gratitude of their countrymen. Steele was in his 
thirty-ninth, and his friend Addison in his thirty-eighth year, 
when the Tatler was started by the former in April, 1709. The 
paper, published thrice a week, had gone on for about six weeks 
before Addison took any part in it; but from that time he 
became, next to Steele, the chief contributor to it, till it was 
dropped in January, 1711. " I have only one gentleman,"' says 
Steels in his preface to the collected papers, " who will be name- 
less, to thank for any frequent assistance to me, which indeed it 
would have been barbarous in him to have denied to one with 
whom he has lived in an intimacy from childhood, considering 
the great ease with which he is able to dispatch the most enter- 
taining pieces of this nature." The person alluded to is Addison. 



358 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

" This good office," Steele generously adds, " he performed with 
such force of genius, humour, wit, and learning, that I faied like 
a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid : 
I was undone by my auxiliary ; when I had once called him in, 
I could not subsist without dependence on him." B}^ far the 
greater part of the Tatler, however, is Steele's. Of 271 papers 
of which it consists, above 200 are attributed either entirely or 
in the greater part to him, while those believed to have been 
written by Addison are only about fifty. Among the other 
contributors Swift is the most frequent. The Spectator was 
begun within two months after the discontinuance of the Tatler, 
and was carried on at the rate of six papers a week till the 6th 
of December, 1712, on which day Number 555 was published. 
In these first seven volumes of the Spectator Addison's papers 
are probably more numerous than Steele's ; and between them 
they wrote perhaps four-fifths of the whole work. The Guardian 
was commenced on the 12th of March, 1713, and, being also 
published six times a week, had extended to 175 numbers, when 
it was brought to a close on the 1st of October in the same year. 
There is only one paper by Addison in the first volume of the 
Guardian, but to the second he was rather a more frequent con- 
tributor than Steele. This was the last work in which the two 
friends joined ; for Addison, we believe, wrote nothing in the 
Englishman, the fifty-seven numbers of which were published, 
at the rate of three a week, between the 6th of October, 1713, 
and the 15th of February following ; nor Steele any of the papers, 
eighty in number, forming the eighth volume of the Spectator, 
of which the first was published on the 18th of June, 1714, the 
last on the 20th of December in the same year, the rate of pub- 
lication being also three times a week. Of these additional 
Spectators twenty-four are attributed to Addison. The friendship 
of nearly half a century which had united these two admirable 
writers was rent asunder by political differences some years 
before the death of Addison, in 1719 : Steele survived till 1720. 

Invented or introduced among us as the periodical essay may 
be said to have been by Steele and Addison, it is a species of 
writing, as already observed, in which perhaps they have never 
been surpassed, or on the whole equalled, by any one of their 
many followers. More elaboration and depth, and also more 
brilliancy, we may have had in some recent attempts of the 
same kind ;\ but hardly so much genuine liveliness, ease, and 
cordiality, anything so thoroughly agreeable, so skilfully adapted 
to interest without demanding more attention than is naturally 
and spontaneously given to it. Perhaps so large an admixture 



SHAFTESBURY; MANDEVILLE. 359 

of the speculative and didactic was never made so easy of appre- 
hension and so entertaining, so like in the reading to the merely 
narrative. But, besides this constant atmosphere of the pleasur- 
able arising simply from the lightness, variety, and urbanity of 
these delightful papers, the delicate imagination and exquisite 
humour of Addison, and the vivacity, warmheartedness, and 
altogether generous nature of Steele, give a charm to the best of 
them, which is to be enjoyed, not described. We not only admire 
the writers, but soon come to love them, and to regard both them 
and the several fictitious personages that move about in the other 
little world they have created for us as among our best and best- 
known friends. 



Shaftesbury ; Mandeville. 



Among the prose works of the early part of the last century 
which used to have the highest reputation for purity and 
elegance of style, is that by Lord Shaftesbury entitled Charac- 
teristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Things. Its author, 
Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (grandson of 
the first Earl, the famous meteoric politician of the reign of 
Charles II.), was born in 1671 and died in 1713 ; and the Cha- 
racteristics, which did not appear in its present form, or with 
that title, till after his death, consists of a collection of disquisi- 
tions on various questions in moral, metaphysical, and critical 
philosophy, most of which he had previously published separately. 

But the most remarkable philosophical work of this time, at least 
in a literary point of view, is Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. 
Bernard de Mandeville was a native of Holland, in which 
country he was born about the year 1670; but, after having 
studied medicine and taken his doctor's degree, he came over to 
England about the end of that century, and he resided here till 
his death in 1733. His Fable of the Bees originally appeared in 
1708, in the form of a poem of 400 lines in octosyllabic verse, 
entitled The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest, and it 
was not till eight years afterwards that he added the prose notes 
which make the bulk of the first volume of the work as we now 
have it. The second volume, or part, which consists of a series 
of six dialogues, was not published till 1729. The leading idea 
of the book is indicated by its second title, Private Vices Public 
Benefits ; — in other words, that what are called and what really 
are vices in themselves, and in the individual indulging in them, 
are nevertheless, in many respects, serviceable to the community. 
Mandeville holds in fact, to quote the words in which he sums 



360 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

up his theory at the close of his first volume, " that neither the 
friendly qualities and kind affections that are natural to man, 
nor the real virtues he is capable of acquiring by reason and 
self-denial, are the foundation of society ; but that what we call 
evil in this world, moral as well as natural, is the grand principle 
that makes us sociable creatures, the solid basis, the life and 
support, of all trades and employments without exception ; that 
there we must look for the true origin of all arts and sciences ; 
and that the moment evil ceases the society must be spoiled, if 
not totally destroyed. ' The doctrine had a startling appearance 
thus nakedly announced ; and the book occasioned a great com- 
motion ; but it is now generally admitted that, whatever may be 
the worth, or worthlessness, of the philosophical system pro- 
pounded in it, the author's object was not an immoral one. In- 
dependently altogether of its general principles and conclusions, 
the work is full both of curious matter and of vigorous writing. 

Mandeville, certainly, is no flatterer of human nature; his 
book, indeed, is written throughout in a spirit not only satirical, 
but cynical. Every page, however, bears the stamp of inde- 
pendent thinking; and many of the remarks he throws out 
indicate that he had at least glimpses of views which were not 
generally perceived or suspected at that day. It would probably 
be found that the Fable of the Bees has been very serviceable 
in the way of suggestion to various subsequent writers who have 
not adopted the general principles of the work. The following 
paragraphs, for example, are remarkable as an anticipation of a 
famous passage in the Wealth of Nations : — 

If we trace the most fiom'ishing nations in their origin, we shall find, 
that, in the remote beginnings of every society, the richest and most con- 
siderable men among them were a great while destitute of a great many 
comforts of life that are now enjoyed by the meanest and most humble 
wretches ; so that many things which were once looked ujiion as the inven- 
tions of luxury are now allowed even to those that are so miserably poor as 
to become the objects of public charity, nay counted so necessary that we 

think no human creature ought to want them A man would 

be laughed at that should discover luxury in the plain dress of a poor 
creature that walks along in a thick parish gown, and a coarse shirt under- 
neath it ; and yet what a number of people, how many diffei-ent trades, and 
what a vai'iety of skill and tools must be emploj^ed to have the most 
ordinary Yorkshire cloth ! What depth of thought and ingenuity, what 
toil and labour, and what length of time must it have cost, before man 
could learn from a seed to raise and prepare so useful a product as linen ! 
—Eemark T, vol. i. pp. 182-183 (edit, of 1724). 

What a bustle is there to be made in several parts of the world before a 
fine scarlet or crimson cloth can be produced; what multiplicity of trades 



MANDEVILLE. 3G1 

and artificers must be employed ! Not only snch. as are obvious, as wool- 
combers, spinners, the weaver, the cloth-worker, the scom-er, the dyer, the 
setter, the drawer, and the packer ; but others that are more remote, and 
might seem foreign to it, — as the mill-wright, the pewterer, and the 
chemist, which yet are all necessary, as well as a great number of other 
handicrafts, to have the tools, utensils, and other implements belonging to 
the trades already named. But all these things are done at home, and 
may be performed without extraordinary fatigue or danger ; the most 
frightful prospect is left behind, when we reflect on the toil and hazard that 
are to be undergone abroad, the vast seas we are to go over, the different 
climates we are to endure, and the several nations we must be obliged to 
for their assistance. Spain alone, it is true, might furnish us with wool to 
make the finest cloth ; but what skill and pains, what experience and 
ingenuity, are required to dye it of those beautiful colours ! How widely 
are the drugs and other ingredients dispersed through the universe that are 
to meet in one kettle ! Alum, indeed, we have of our own ; argot we 
might have from the Khine, and vitriol from Hungary : all this is in 
Europe. But then for saltpetre in quantity we are forced to go as far as 
the East Indies. Cochenil, unknown to the ancients, is not much nearer 
to us, though in a quite different part of the earth ; we buy it, 'tis true, 
from the SJDaniards : but, not being their product, they are forced to fetch 
it for us from the remotest corner of the new world in the West Indies. 
Whilst so many sailors are broiling in the sun and sweltered with heat in 
the East and West of us, another set of them are freezing in the North to 
fetch potashes from Kussia. — Search into the Nature of Society (appended 
to the second edition), pp. 411-413. 

In another place, indeed (EemarkQ, pp. 213-216), Mandeville 
almost enunciates one of the great leading principles of Smith's 
work : after showing how a nation might be undone by too much 
money, he concludes, " Let the value of gold and silver either 
rise or fall, the enjoyment of all societies will ever depend upon 
the fruits of the earth and the labour of the people ; both which 
joined together are a more certain, a more inexhaustible, and a 
more real treasure than the gold of Brazil or the silver of Potosi." 
It might be conjectured also from some of his other writings that 
Smith M^as a reader of Mandeville : the following sentence, for 
instance (Eemark C, p. 55), may be said almost to contain the 
germ of the Theory of the Moral Sentiments : — " That we are 
often ashamed and blush for others ... is nothing else but that 
sometimes we make the case of others too nearly our own ; — so 
people shriek out when they see others in danger : — whilst we 
are reflecting with too much earnest on the effect which such 
a blameable action, if it was ours, would produce in us, the 
spirits, and consequently the blood, are insensibly moved after 
the same manner as if the action was our own, and so the same 
symptoms must appear." 



362 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Gay; Arbuthnot; Atterbury. 

Along with Pope, as we have seen, Swift numbers among those 
who would most monrn his death, Gay and Arbuthnot. He 
survived them both, Gay having died, in his forty-fourth year, in 
1732, and Arbuthnot at a much more advanced age in 1735. 

John Gay, the author of a considerable quantity of verse and 
of above a dozen dramatic pieces, is now chiefly remembered for 
his Beggar's Opera, his Fables, his mock-heroic poem of Trivia, 
or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, and some of his 
ballads. He has no pretensions to any elevation of genius, but 
there is an agreeable ease, nature, and sprightliness in every- 
thing he has written ; and the happiest of his performances are 
animated by an archness, and light but spirited raillery, in 
which he has not often been excelled. His celebrated English 
opera, as it was the first attempt of the kind, still remains the 
only one that has been eminently successful. Now, indeed, that 
much of the wit has lost its point and application to existing 
characters and circumstances, the dialogue of the play, apart 
from the music, may be admitted to owe its popularity in some 
degree to its traditionary fame ; but still what is temporary in it 
is intermixed with a sufficiently diffused, though not very rich, 
vein of general satire, to allow the whole to retain considerable 
piquancy. Even at first the Beggar's Opera was probably in- 
debted for the greater portion of its success to the music ; and 
that is so happily selected that it continues still as fresh and as 
delightful as ever. 

Dr. John Arbuthnot, a native of Scotland, besides various 
professional works of much ability, is generally regarded as the 
author of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, printed in the 
works of Pope and Swift, and said to have been intended as the 
commencement of a general satire on the abuses of learning, of 
which, however, nothing more was ever written except Pope's 
treatise already mentioned on the Bathos, and one or two shorter 
fragments. The celebrated political satire, entitled The History 
of John Bull, which has been the model of various subsequent 
imitations, but of none in which the fiction is at once so apposite 
and so ludicrous, is also attributed to Arbuthnot. Pope's highly 
wrought and noble Prologue to his Satires, which is addressed 
to Arbuthnot, or rather in which the latter figures as the poet's 
interlocutor, will for ever preserve both the memory of their 
friendship, and also some traits of the character and manner of 
the learned, witty, and kind-hearted physician. 

The commencement of the reign of the Whigs at the accession 



PRIOR; PARNELL. 363 

of the House of Hanover, which deprived Arbuthnot of his 
appointment of one of the physicians extraordinary — leaving him, 
however, in the poet's words, 

social, cheerful, and serene, 
And just as rich as when he served a queen — 

was more fatal to the fortunes of another of Pope's Tory or 
Jacobite friends, Francis Atterbury, the celebrated Bishop of 
Eochester, already mentioned as the principal author of the reply 
to Bentley's Dissertation on Phalaris. Atterbury also took a 
distinguished part in the professional controversies of his day, 
and his sermons and letters, and one or two short copies of verse 
by him, are well known ; but his fervid character probably 
flashed out in conversation in a way of which we do not gather 
any notion from his writings. Atterbury was deprived and 
outlawed in 1722 ; and he died abroad in 1731, in his sixty-ninth 
year. 

Prior; Parnell. 

Matthew Prior is another distinguished name in the band of the 
Tory writers of this age, and he was also an associate of Pope 
and Swift, although we hear less of him in their epistolary cor- 
respondence than of most of their other friends. Yet perhaps no 
one of the minor wits and poets of the time has continued to 
enjoy higher or more general favour with posterity. Much that 
he wrote, indeed, is now forgotten ; but some of the best of his 
comic tales in verse will live as long as the language, which 
contains nothing that surpasses them in the union of ease and 
fluency with sprightliness and point, and in all that makes up 
the spirit of humorous and graceful narrative. They are our 
happiest examples of a style that has been cultivated with more 
frequent success by French writers than by our own. In one 
poem, his Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, extending to three 
cantos, he has even applied this light and airy manner of treat- 
ment with remarkable felicity to some of the most curious 
questions in mental philosophy. In another still longer work, 
again, entitled Solomon on the Yanity of the World, in three 
Books, leaving his characteristic archness and pleasantry, he 
emulates not unsuccessfully the dignity of Pope, not without 
some traces of natural eloquence and picturesqueness of expres- 
sion which are all his own. Prior, who was born in 1664, 
commenced poet before the Revolution, by the publication in 
1688 of his City Mouse and Country Mouse, written in concert 



364 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

with Charles Montagu, afterwards Earl of Halifax, in ridicule of 
Dryden's Hind and Panther ; and lie continued a Whig nearly to 
the end of the reign of William ; but he then joined the most 
extreme section of the Tories, and acted cordially with that 
party down to his death in 1721. Such also was the political 
course of Pamell, only that, being a younger man, he did not 
make his change of party till some years after Prior. The Eev. 
Dr. Thomas Parnell was born at Dublin in 1679, and left his 
original friends the Whigs at the same time with Swift, on the 
ejection of Lord Godolphin's ministry, in 1710. He died in 
1718. Parnell is always an inoffensive and agreeable writer; 
and sometimes, as, for example, in his Nightpiece on Death, 
which probably suggested Gray's more celebrated Elegy, he rises 
to considerable impressiveness and solemn pathos. But, although 
his poetry is uniformly fluent and transparent, and its general 
spirit refined and delicate, it has little warmth or richness, and 
can only be called a sort of water-colour poetry. One of Parnell's 
pieces, we may remark, — his Fairy Tale of Edwin and Sir Topaz, 
— may have given some hints to Burns for his Tam o' Shanter. 



BOLING BROKE. 

The mention of Prior naturally suggests that of his friend and 
patron, and also the friend of Swift and Pope — Henry St. John, 
better known by his title of the Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 
although his era comes down to a later date, for he was not bom 
till 1678, and he lived to 1751. Bolingbroke wrote no poetry, 
but his collected prose works fill five quarto volumes (without 
including his letters), and would thus entitle him by their 
quantity alone to be ranked as one of the most considerable 
writers of his time ; of which we have abundant testimony that 
he was one of the most brilliant orators and talkers, and in every 
species of mere cleverness one of the most distinguished figures. 
His writings, being principally on subjects of temporary politics, 
have lost much of their interest ; but a few of them, esjoecially 
his Letters on the Study and Use of History, his Idea of a Patriot 
King, and his account and defence of his own conduct in his 
famous Letter to Sir William Windham, will still reward perusal 
even for the sake of their matter, while in style and manner 
almost everything he has left is of very remarkable merit. 
Bolingbroke's style, as we have elsewhere observed, " was a 
happy medium betM'-een that of the scholar and that of the man 
of society — or rather it was a happy combination of the best 



GARTH; BLACKMORE. 365 

qualities of both, heightening the ease, freedom, fluency, and 
liveliness of elegant conversation with many of the deeper and 
richer tones of the eloquence of formal orations and of books. 
The example he thus set has probably had a very considerable 
effect in moulding the style of popular writing among us since 
his time."* 



Garth: Blackmore. 



In one of the passages in which he commemorates the friend- 
ship of Swift, Atterbury, and Bolingbroke, Pope records also the 
encouragement his earliest performances in rhyme received from 
a poet and man of wit of the opposite party, ' ' well-natured 
Garth."f Sir Samuel Garth, who was an eminent physician and 
a zealous Whig, is the author of various poetical pieces published 
in the reigns of William and Anne, of which the one of greatest 
pretension is that entitled The Dispensary, a mock epic, in six 
short cantos, on the quarrels of his professional brethren, which 
appeared in 1699. The wit of this slight performance may have 
somewhat evaporated with age, but it cannot have been at any 
time very pungent. A mu:ch more voluminous, and also more 
ambitious, Whig poet of this Augustan age, as it is sometimes 
called, of our literature, was another physician, Sir Richard 
Blackmore. Blackmore made his debut as a poet so early as the 
year 1696, by the publication of his Prince Arthur, which was 
followed by a succession of other epics, or long poems of a serious 
kind, each in six, ten, or twelve books, under the names of King 
Arthur, King Alfred, Eliza, the Eedeemer, the Creation, &c., 
besides a Paraphrase of the Book of Job, a new version of the 
Psalms, a Satire on Wit, and various shorter effusions both in 
verse and prose. The indefatigable rhymester — *' the everlasting 
Blackmore," as Pope calls him — died at last in 1729. Nothing 
can be conceived wilder or more ludicrous than this incessant 
discharge of epics; but Blackmore, whom Dryden charged w^ith 
writing "to the rumbling of his coach's wheels," maj'^ be pro- 
nounced, without any undue severity, to have been not more a 
fool than a blockhead. His Creation, indeed, has been praised 
both by Addison and Johnson ; but the politics of the author 
may be supposed to have blinded or mollified the one critic, and 
his piety the other ; at least the only thing an ordinary reader 

* Article on Bolingbroke in Penny Cyclopaedia, v. 78. 
f See Prologue to the Satires, 135, &c. 



366 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

will be apt to discover in this his chef-d'oeuvre, that is not the 
flattest commonplace, is an occasional outbreak of the most 
ludicrous extravagance and bombast. Altogether this knight, 
droning away at his epics for above a quarter of a century, is as 
absurd a phenomenon as is presented to us in the history of 
literature. Pope has done him no more than justice in assigning 
him the first place among the contending "brayers" at the 
immortal games instituted by the goddess of the Dunciad : — 

But far o'er all, sonorous Blackmore's strain : 
Walls, steeples, skies, bray back to him again. 
In Tot'nam fields the brethren, with amaze, 
Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze ; 
Long Chancery-lane retentive rolls the sound, 
And courts to courts return it round and round ; 
Thames wafts it thence to Eufus' roarmg hall, 
And Hungerford re-echoes bawl for bawl. 
All hail him victor in both gifts of song, 
Who sings so loudly and who sings so long. 



Defoe. 

The Whigs, however, had to boast of one gieat writer of prose 
fiction, if, indeed, one who, although taking a frequent and 
warm part in the discussion of political subjects, really stood 
aloof from and above all parties, and may be said to have been 
in enlargement of view far in advance of all the public men of 
his time, can be properly claimed by any party. Nor does 
Daniel Defoe seem to have been recognized as one of them- 
selves by the Whigs of his own day. He stood up, indeed, 
from first to last, for the principles of the Eevolution agaiuso 
those of the Jacobites ; but in the alternatiDg struggle between 
the Whig and Tory parties for the possession of office he took 
little or no concern ; he served and opposed administrations of 
either colour without reference to anything but their measures : 
thus we find him in 1706 assisting Godolphin and his colleagues 
to compass the union with Scotland ; and in 1713 exerting 
himself with equal zeal Id supporting Harley and Bolingbroke 
in the attempt to carry thiough their commercial treaty with 
France. He is believed to have first addressed himself to his 
countrymen through the press in 1683, when he was only in his 
twenty-third year. From this time for a space of above thirty 
years he may be said never to have laid down his pen as a 
political writer ; his publications in piose and verse, which are 
far too numerous to be here particularized, embracing nearly 



DEFOE. 367 

every subject which either the progress of events made of 
prominent importance during that time, or which was of emi- 
nent popular or social interest independently of times and 
circumstances. Many of these productions, written for a tem- 
porary purpose, or on the spur of some particular occasion, still 
retain a considerable value, even for their matter, either as 
directories of conduct or accounts of matters of fact ; some, 
indeed, such as his History of the Union, are the works of 
highest authority we possess respecting the transactions to 
which they relate ; all of them bear the traces of a sincere, 
earnest, manly character, and of an understanding unusually 
active, penetrating, and well-informed. Evidence enough there 
often is, no doubt, of haste and precipitation, but it is always 
the haste of a full mind : the subject may be rapidly and some- 
what rudely sketched out, and the matter not always very 
artificially disposed, or set forth to the most advantage; but 
Defoe never wrote for the mere sake of writing, or unless when 
he really had something to state which he conceived it important 
that the public should know. He was too thoroughly honest 
to make a trade of politics. 

Defoe's course and character as a political writer bear a con- 
siderable resemblance in some leading points to those of one of 
the most remarkable men of our own day, the late William 
Cobbett, who, however, had certainly much more passion and 
wilfulness than Defoe, whatever we may think of his claims to 
as much principle. But Defoe's political writings make the 
smallest part of his literary renown. At the age of fifty-eight — 
an age when other writers, without the tenth part of his amount 
of performance to boast of, have usually thought themselves 
entitled to close their labours — he commenced a new life of 
authorship with all the spirit and hopeful alacrity of five-and- 
twenty. A succession of works of fiction, destined, some of 
them, to take and keep the highest rank in that department of 
our literature, and to become popular books in every language 
of Europe, now proceeded from his pen with a rapidity evincing 
the easiest flow as well as the greatest fertility of imagination. 
Eobinson Crusoe appeared in 1719 ; the Dumb Phrhsisopher, the 
same year; Captain Singleton, in 1720 ; Duncan Cam^ell, the 
same year; Moll Flanders, in 1721; Colonel Jacque, 1^^1722 ; 
the Journal of the Plague, and probably, also, the Memofe of 
a Cavalier (to which there is no date), the same year ; the 
Fortunate Mistress, or Roxana, in 1724 ; the New Voyage 
Eound the World, in 1725; and the Memoirs of Captain 
Carleton, in 1728. But these efiusions of his inventive faculty 



868 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

seem to have been, after all, little more thaii tlie amusements 
of his leisure. In the course of the twelve years from 1719 to 
his death in 1731, besides his novels, he produced about twenty 
miscellaneous works, many of them of considerable extent. It 
may be prettj^ safely affirmed that no one who has written 
so much has written so well. No writer of fictitious nan-ative 
has ever excelled him in at least one prime excellence — the 
air of reality which he throws over the creations of his fancy ; 
an effect proceeding from the strength of conception with which 
he enters into the scenes, adventures, and characters he under- 
takes to describe, and his perfect reliance upon his power of 
interesting the reader by the plainest possible manner of re- 
lating things essentially interesting. Truth and nature are 
never either improved by flowers of speech in Defoe, or 
smothered under that sort of adornment. In some of his po- 
litical writings there are not wanting passages of considerable 
height of style, in which, excited by a fit occasion, he employs 
to good purpose the artifices of rhetorical embellishment and 
modulation : but in his works of imagination his almost constant 
characteristic is a simplicity and plainness, which, if there be 
any afi*ectation about it at all, is chargeable only with that 
of a homeliness sometimes approaching to rusticity. His 
writing, however, is always full of idiomatic nerve, and in a 
high degree graphic and expressive ; and even its occasional 
slovenliness, whether the result of carelessness or design, aids 
the illusion by which the fiction is made to read so like a 
matter of fact. The truthful air of Defoe's fictions, we may 
just remark, is of quite a different character from that of Swift's, 
in which, although there is also much of the same vivid con- 
ception, and therefore minutely accurate delineation, of every 
person and thing introduced, a discerning reader will always 
perceive a smile lurking beneath the author's assumed gravitj^, 
telling him intelligibly enough that the whole is a joke. It is 
said, indeed, that, as the Journal of the Plague is quoted as an 
authentic narrative by Dr. Mead, and as Lord Chatham was, 
in all simplicity, in the habit of recommending the Memoirs 
of a Cavalier to his friends as the best account of the Civil 
Wars, and as those of Captain Carleton were read even by 
Samuel Johnson without a suspicion of their being other than 
a true history, so some Irish bishop was found with faith enough 
to believe in Gulliver's Travels, although not a little amazed 
by some things stated in the book. But it is not probable that 
there ever was any second instance, even on the Irish episcopal 
bench, of so much high a pitch of innocence. 



369 

Dramatic Weiters. 

To this age, also, belong three of the greatest of our comic 
dramatists. Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar were born in 
the order in which w^e have named them, and also, we believe, 
successively presented themselves before the public as writers 
for the stage in. the same order, althougli they reversed it in 
making their exits from the stage of life, — Farqubar djdng in 
1707 at the age of twenty -nine, VanbiTigli in 1726 at that of fifty- 
four, Congreve not till 1729 in his fifty-ninth or sixtieth year. 

Congreve's first play, The Old Bachelor, was brought out in 
1693, the author having already, two or three years before, 
made himself known in the literary world by a novel called The 
Incognita, or Love and Duty Eeconciled, The Old Bachelor 
was followed hy The Double Dealer in 1694, and by Love for 
Love in 1695 ; the tragedy of The Mourning Bride was produced 
in 1697; and the comedy of The Way of the World, in 1700: 
a masquerade and an opera, both of slight importance, were the 
only dramatic pieces he wrote during the rest of his life. The 
comed}^ of Congreve has not much character, still less humour, 
and no nature at all ; but blazes and crackles with wdt and 
repartee, for the most part of an unusually pure and brilliant 
species, — not quaint, forced, and awkward, like what we find 
in some other attempts, in our dramatic literature and elsewdiere, 
at the same kind of display, but apparently as eas}' and spon- 
taneous as it is pointed, polished, and exact. His plots are also 
constructed with much artifice. 

Sir John Yanbrugh is the author of ten or twelve comedies, 
of which the first, The Eelapse, w^as produced in 1697, and of 
which The Provoked Wife, The Confederacy, and The Journey 
to London (which last, left unfinished by the author, was com- 
pleted by CoUey Cibber), are those of greatest merit. The wit 
of Yanbrugh flows rather than flashes ; but its copious stream 
may vie in its own way with, the dazzling fire-shower of Con- 
greve's ; and his characters have much more of real flesh and 
blood in their composition, coarse and vicious as almost all the 
more powerfully drawn among them are. 

George Farquhar, the author of The Constant Couple and The 
Beaux' Stratagem, and of five or six other comedies, was a native 
of Ireland, in which country Congreve also spent his childhood 
and boyhood. Farquhar's first play, his Love in a Bottle, was 
brought out with great success at Drury Lane in 1698; The 
Beaux' Stratagem, his last, was in the midst of its run when the 
illness during which it had been written terminated in the poor 

2 JB 



370 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

autlior's early deatli. The thougMless and volatile, but good- 
natured and generous, cliaracter of Farquhar is reflected in his 
comedies, which, with less sparkle, have more natural life and 
airiness, and are animated by a finer spirit of whim, than those 
of either Vanbrugh or Congreve. His morality, like theirs, is 
abundantly free and easy ; but there is much more heart about 
his profligacy than in theirs, as well as much less grossness or 
hardness. 

To these names may be added that of CoUey Gibber, who has, 
however, scarcely any pretensions to be ranked as one of our 
classic dramatists, although, of about two dozen comedies, tra- 
gedies, and other pieces of which he is the author, his Careless 
Husband and one or two others may be admitted to be lively 
and agreeable. Gibber, who was born in 1671, produced his 
first ]3lay, the comedy of Love's Last Shift, in 1696, and was 
still an occasional writer for the stage after the commencement 
of the reigTi of Greorge II. ; one of his productions, indeed, his 
tragedy entitled Papal Tyranny, was brought out so late as the 
year 1745, when he himself performed one of the principal 
characters; and he lived till 1757. His well-known account 
of his own life, or his Apology for his Life, as he modestly or 
affectedly calls it, is an amusing piece of something higher than 
gossip ; the sketches he gives of the various celebrated actors of 
his time are many of them executed, not perhaps with the deepest 
insight, but jet with much graphic skill in so far as regards 
those mere superficial characteristics that meet the ordinary eye. 

The chief tragic writer of this age was Nicholas Kowe,the author 
of The Fair Penitent and Jane Shore, of five other tragedies, one 
comedy, and a translation in rhyme of Lucan's Pharsalia. Eowe, 
who was born in 1673, and died in 1718, was esteemed in his 
own day a great master of the pathetic, but is now regarded as 
little more than a smooth and occasionally sounding versifier. 



Minor Poets. 

The age of the first two Georges, if we put aside what was done 
by Pope, or consider him as belonging properly to the preceding- 
reign of Anne, was not ver}^ prolific in poetry of a high order; 
but there are several minor poets belonging to this time whose 
names live in our literature, and some of whose productions are 
still read. Matthew Green's poem entitled The Spleen ori- 
ginally appeared, we believe, in his lifetime in the first volume 
of Dodsley's Collection — although his other pieces, which ai-e 



DYER; SOMERVILE; TICKELL. 371 

few in number and of little note, were only published by liis 
friend Glover after the death of the author in 1737, at the age 
of forty-one. The Spleen, a reflective effusion in octo-syllabic 
verse, is somewhat striking from an air of originality in the 
vein of thought, and from the laboured concentration and epi- 
grammatic point of the language ; but, although it was much 
cried up when it first appeared, and the laudation has continued 
to be duly echoed by succeeding formal criticism, it may be 
doubted if many readers could now make their way through 
it without considerable fatigue, or if it be much read in fact at 
all. With all its ingenious or energetic rhetorical posture- 
making, it has nearly as little real play of fancy as charm of 
numbers, and may be most properly characterized as a piece of 
bastard or perverted Hudibrastic — an imitation of the manner of 
Butler to the very dance of his verse, only without the comedy 
— the same antics, only solemnized or made to carry a moral 
and serious meaning. The Grongar Hill of Dyer was published 
in 1726, when its author was in his twenty-seventh year; and 
was followed by The Euins of Eome in 1740, and his most 
elaborate performance, The Fleece, in 1757, the year before his 
death. Dyer's is a natural and true note, though not one of 
much power or compass. What he has written is his own; 
not borrowed from or suggested by "others' books," but what 
he has himself seen, thought, and felt. He sees, too, with an 
artistic eye — while at the same time his pictures are full of the 
moral inspiration which alone makes description poetry. There 
is also considerable descriptive power in Somervile's blank verse 
poem of The Chase, in four Books, which was first published 
in 1735. Somervile, who was a Warwickshire squire, and the 
intimate friend of Shenstone, and who, besfdes his Chase, wrote 
various other pieces, now for the most part forgotten^ died in 
1742. Tickell, Addison's friend, who was born in 1686 and 
lived till 1740, is the author of a number of compositions, of 
which his Elegy on Addison and his ballad of Colin and Lucy 
are the best known. The ballad Gray has called " the prettiest 
in the world " — and if prettiness, by which Gray here probably 
means a certain easy simplicity and trimness, were the soul of 
ballad poetry, it might carry away a high prize. Nobody wi-ites 
better giammar than Tickell. His stjde is always remarkably 
clear and exact, and the mere appropriateness and judicious 
collocation of the words, aided by the swell of the verse in his 
more elaborate or solemn passages, have sometimes an impos- 
ing effect. Of his famous Elegy, the most opposite opinions 
have been expressed. Goldsmith has called it " one of the 



372 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

finest in our language ;" and Johnson has declared that " a more 
sublime or elegant funeral poem is not to be found in the whole 
compass of English literature." So Lord Macaulay : — " Tickell 
bewailed his friend in an Elegy which would do honour to 
the greatest name in our literature, and which unites the energy 
and magnificence of Dryden to the tenderness and purity of 
Cowper." * Steele on the other hand has denounced it as being 
nothing more than " prose in rhyme." And it must be admitted 
that it is neither very tender nor very imaginative ; yet rhyme 
too is part and parcel of poetry, and solemn thoughts, vigorously 
expressed and melodiously enough versified, which surely we 
have here, cannot reasonably be refused that name, even though 
the informing power of passion or imagination may not be 
present in any very high degiee. 

The notorious Eichard Savage is the author of several poetical 
compositions, published in the last fifteen or twenty years of 
his tempestuous and unhappy life, which he closed in Bristol 
jail in 1743, at the age of foity-six. Savage's poem called The 
Bastard has some vigorous lines, and some touches of tenderness 
as well as bursts of more violent passion ; but, as a whole, it is 
crude, spasmodic, and frequently wordy and languid. His other 
compositions, some of which evince a talent for satire, of which 
assiduous cultivation might have made something, have all 
passed into oblivion. The personal history of Savage, which 
Johnson's ardent and expanded narrative has made universally 
known, is more interesting than his verse ; but even that owes 
more than half its attraction to his biographer. He had, in fact, 
all his life, apparently, much more of another kind of madness 
than he ever had of that of poetry. 

Fenton and Broome — the former of whom died in 1730 at the 
age of forty-seven, the latter in 1745, at what age is not known, 
— are chiefly remembered as Pope's coadjutois in his translation 
of the Odyssey. Johnson observes, in his Life of Fenton, that 
the readers of poetry have never been able to distinguish their 
Books from those of Pope; but the account he has given heie 
and in the Life of Broome of the respective shares of the three, 
on the information, as he says, of Mr. Langton, who had got it 
from Spence, may be reasonably doubted. It differs, indeed, in 
some respects from that given in Spence's Anecdotes, since 
published. A critical reader will detect very marked varieties 
of style and manner in the different parts of the work. It is 
very clear, for instance, that the nineteenth and twentieth Books 
are not by Pope, and have not even received much of his revi- 
* Essay on Addison. 



FENTON AND BROOME. 373 

sion : thej are commonly attributed to Fentoii, and we should 
think rightly. But it is impossible to believe, on the other 
hand, that the translator of these two Books is also the trans- 
lator of the whole of the fourth Book, which is likewise 
assigned to Fenton in Johnson's statement. Could any one 
except Pope have written the following lines, which occur in 
that Book ?— 

But, oh, beloved by heaven, reserved to thee, 

A happier lot the smiling fates decree ; 

Free from that law, beneath whose mortal sway 

Matter is changed, and varying forms decay, 

Elysium shall be thine ; the blissful plains 

Of utmost earth, where Rhadamanthus reigns. 

Joys ever young, unmixed with pain or fear, 

Fill the wide circle of the eternal year : 

Stern winter smiles on that auspicious clime, 

The fields are florid with unfading prime ; 

From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow, 

Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow ; 

But from the breezy deep the bless'd inhale 

The fragrant murmurs of the western gale. 

This grace peculiar will the Gods afford 

To thee, the son of Jove, the beauteous Helen's lord. 

Pope, indeed, may have inserted this and other passages in this 
and other Books, of which he did not translate the whole. 
Broome was a much more dexterous versifier than Fenton, and 
would come much nearer to Pope's ordinary manner : still we 
greatly doubt if the twenty-third Book in particular (which 
passes for Broome's) be not fentirely Pope's, and also many parts 
of the second, the eighth, the eleventh, and the twelfth. On the 
other hand, the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and twenty- 
fourth seem to us to be throughout more likely to be by him 
than by Pope. Pope himself seems to have looked upon Broome 
as rather a clever mimic of his own manner than as anything 
much higher. When they had quarrelled a few years after 
this, he introduced his old associate in the Dunciad, in a 
passage which originally ran : — 

See under Ripley rise a new Whitehall, 

While Jones and Boyle's united labours fall ; 

While Wren with sorrow to the grave descends, 

Gay dies unpen sioned with a hundred friends ; 

Hibernian politics, Swift, thy doom, 

And Pope's, translating ten whole years with Broome. 

It was pretended, indeed, in a note, that no harm was meant to 
poor Broome by this delicate crucifixion of hii^. Yet he is 



374 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

understood to be the W. B. w"ho, in tlie sixth chapter of the Art 
of Sinking in Poetry, entitled " Of the several kinds of geniuses in 
the Profound, and the marks and characters of each," heads the 
list of those described as "the Parrots, that repeat another's 
words in such a hoarse, odd voice, as makes them seem their 
own." And Broome, as Johnson has observed, is quoted more 
than once in the treatise as a proficient in the Bathos. Johnson 
adds, "I have been told that they were afterwards reconciled; 
but I am afraid their peace was without friendship." The 
couplet in the Dunciad, at least, was ultimately altered to — 

Hibernian politics, Swift ! thy fate, 

And Pope's, ten years to comment and translate. 

Both Broome and Penton published also various original compo- 
sitions in verse, but nothing that the world has not very will- 
ingly let die. Fenton, however, although his contributions to the 
translation of the Odyssey neither harmonize well with the rest 
of the work, nor are to be commended taken by themselves, had 
more force and truth of poetical feeling than many of his verse- 
making contemporaries : one of his pieces, his ode to Lord Gower, 
is not unmusical, nor without a certain lyric glow and elevation. 
Another small poet of this age is Ambrose Philips, whose Six 
Pastorals and tragedy of The Distressed Mother brought him vast 
reputation when they were first produced, but whose name has 
been kept in the recollection of posterit}^ perhaps, more by 
Pope's vindictive satire. An ironical criticism on the Pastorals 
in the Guardian, which took in Steele, who published it in the 
40th number of that paper (for 27th April, 1713), was followed 
long afterwards by the unsparing ridicule of the Treatise on the. 
Art of Sinking in Poetry, in which many of the illustrations are 
taken from the rhymes of poor Philips, who is held up in one 
place as the great master both of the infantine and the inane in 
style, and is elsewhere placed at the head of the clan of writers 
designated the Tortoises, who are described as slow and dull, 
and, like pastoral writers, delighting much in gardens : " they 
have," it is added, " for the most part, a fine embroidered shell, 
and underneath it a heavy lump.* Philips, in some of his later 
etfusions, had gone, in pursuit of what he conceived to be nature 

* According to Johnson, G-ay's Pastorals were written at Pope's instigation, 
in ridicule of those of Philips ; " but," it is added, " the effect of reality and 
truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovel- 
ling and degraded. These Pastorals became popular, and were read with 
delight, as just representations of rural manners and occupations, by those 
who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of the critical 
dispute." — Life of Gay, 



PHILIPS; HAMMOND. 375 

and simplicity, into a style of writing in short verses with not 
overmuch meaning, which his enemies parodied under the name 
of Namby-pamby. On the whole, however, he had no great 
reason to complain : if his poetry was laughed at by Pope and 
the Tories, it was both landed, and very substantially rewarded, 
by the Whigs, who not only made Philips a lottery commissioner 
and a justice of peace for Westminster, but continued to push 
him forward till he became member for the county of Armagh 
in the Irish parliament, and afterwards judge of the Irish Prero- 
gative Court. His success in life is alluded to in the same part 
of the Dunciad where Broome is brought in — in the line, 

Lo ! Ambrose Philips is preferred for wit ! 

This Nam6y-pam6y Philips, who was born in 1671 and lived 
till 1749, must not be confounded with John Philips, the author 
of the mock-heroic poem of The Splendid Shilling (published in 
1703), and also of a poem in two books, in serious blank verse, 
entitled Cider, which has the reputation of being a good practical 
treatise on the brewing of that drink. John Philips, who pub- 
lished likewise a poem on the battle of Blenheim, in rivalry of 
Addison, was a Tory poet, and the affectation of simplicity, at 
least, cannot be laid to his charge, for what he aims at imitating 
or appropriating is not what is called the language of nature, but 
the swell and pomp of Milton. His serious poetry, however, is 
not worth much, at least as poetry. John Philips was born in 
1676, and died in 1708. 

Two or three more names may be merely mentioned. Leonard 
Welsted, who was born in 1689, and died in 1747, also, like 
Ambrose Philips, figures in the Dunciad and in the Treatise of 
Martinus Scriblerus, and produced a considerable quantity both 
of verse and prose, all now utterly forgotten. Thomas Yalden, 
who died a Doctor of Divinity in 1736, was a man of wit as well 
as the writer of a number of odes, elegies, hymns, fables, and 
other compositions in verse, of which one, entitled a Hymn to 
Darkness, is warmly praised by Dr. Johnson, who has given the 
author a place in his Lives of the Poets. In that work too may 
be found an account of Hammond, the author of the Love 
l&legies, who died in 1742, in his thirty-second year, driven 
mad, and eventually sent to his grave, it is affirmed, by the 
inexorable cruelty of the lady, a Miss Dashwood, who, under the 
name of Delia, is the subject of his verses, and who, we are told, 
survived him for thirty-seven years without finding any one else 
either to marry or fall in love with her. The character, as 
Johnson remarks, that Hammond bequeathed her was not likely 



376 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

to attract conrtsliip. Hammond's poetry, however, reflects but 
coldly the amorous fire which produced all this mischief ; it is 
correct and graceful, but languid almost to the point of drowsi- 
ness. Gilbert West was born about 1705, and died in 1756 : 
besides other verse, he published a translation of a portion of the 
odes of Pindar, which had long considerable reputation, but is not 
very Pindaric, though a smooth and sonorous performance. The 
one of his works that has best kept its ground is his prose tract 
entitled Observations on the Eesurrection, a very able and 
ingenious disquisition, for which the university of Oxford made 
West a Doctor of Laws. Aaron Hill, who was born in 1685 and 
died in 1750, and who lies buried in Westminster Abbey, was at 
different periods of his life a traveller, a projector, a theatrical 
manager, and a literary man. He is the author of no fewer 
than seventeen dramatic pieces, original and translated, among 
which his versions of Voltaire's Zaire and Merope long kept 
possession of the stage. His poetry is in general both pompous 
and empty enough ; and of all he has written, almost the only 
passage that is now much remembered is a satiric sketch of Pope, 
in a few lines, which have some imitative smartness, but scarcely 
any higher merit. Pope had offended him by putting him in 
the Dunciad, though the way in which he is mentioned is really 
complimentary to Hill. 



Collins ; Shexstone ; Geay. 



By far the greatest of all the poetical writers of this age who, 
from the small quantity of their productions, or the brevity of 
each of them separately considered, are styled minor poets, is 
Collins. William Collins, born in 1720, died at the early age of 
thirty-six, and nearly all his poetry had been written ten years 
before his death. His volume of Odes, descriptive and allegori- 
cal, was published in 1746 ; his Oriental Eclogues had appeared 
some years before, while he was a student at Oxford. Only his 
unfi.nished Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlanders 
was found among his papers after his death, and it is dated 1749. 
The six or seven last years of his short life were clouded with a 
depression of spirits which made intellectual exertion impossible. 
All that Collins has written is full of imagination, pathos, and 
melody. The defect of his poetrj^ in general is that there is too 
little of earth in it : in the purity and depth of its beauty it 
resembles the bright blue sky. Yet Collins had genius enough 
for anything ; and in his ode entitled The Passions he has shown 



YOUNG; THOMSON. 377 

with how strong a voice and pulse of humanity he could, when 
he chose, animate his verse, and what extensive and enduring 
popularity he could command. 

Gray and Shenstone were both born before Collins, though 
they both outlived him, — Shenstone dying at the age of fifty in 
1763, Gray at that of fifty -fi.ve in 1771. Shenstone is remem- 
bered for his Pastoral Ballad, his Schoolmistress, and an elegy. 
or two; but there was very little potency of any kind in the 
music of his slender o-aten pipe. Gray's famous Elegy written 
in a Country Churchyard, his two Pindarics, his Ode on Eton 
College, his Long Story, some translations from the Korse and 
Welsh, and a few other short pieces, which make up his contri- 
butions to the poetry of his native language, are all admirable 
for their exquisite finish, nor is a true poetical spirit ever want- 
ing, whatever may be thought of the form in which it is some- 
times embodied. When his two celebrated compositions, The 
Progress of Poesy and The Bard, appeared together in 1757, 
Johnson affirms that " the readers of poetry were at first content 
to gaze in mute amazement ;" and, although the difficulty or 
impossibility of understanding them which was then, it seems, 
felt and confessed, is no longer complained of, much severe 
animadversion has been passed on them on other accounts. Still, 
whatever objections may be made to the artificial and unnatural 
character and over-elaboration of their style, the gorgeous 
brocade of the verse does not hide the true fire and fancy 
beneath, or even the real elegance of taste that has arrayed itself 
so ambitiously. But Gray often expresses himself, too, as 
naturally and simply in his poetry as he always does in his 
charming Letters and other writings in prose : the most touch- 
ing of the verses in his Ode to Eton College, for instance, are so 
expressed ; and in his Long Story he has given the happiest 
proof of his mastery over the lightest graces and gaieties of song. 



Young: Thomsox. 



Of the remaining poetical names of this age the two most 
considerable are those of Young and Thomson. Dr. Edward 
Young, the celebrated author of the Night Thoughts, was born 
in 1681 and lived till 1765. He may be shortly characterized 
as, at least in manner, a sort of successor, under the reign of 
Pope and the new style established by him and Dryden, of the 
Donnes and the Cowleys of a former age. He had nothing, 
however, of Donne's subtle fancy, and as little of the gaiety and 



378 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

playfulness that occasionally break out among tlie quibbles and 
contortions of Cowley. On the other hand, he has much more 
passion and pathos than Cowley, and, with less elegance, perhaps 
makes a nearer approach in some of his greatest passages to the 
true sublime. But his style is radically an affected and false 
one ; and of what force it seems to possess, the greater part is 
the result not of any real principle of life within it, but of mere 
strutting and straining. Nothing can be more unlike the poetry 
of the Night Thoughts than that of the Seasons. If Young is 
all art and effort, Thomson is all negligence and nature ; so 
negligent, indeed, that he pours forth his unpremeditated song 
apparently without the thought ever occurring to him that he 
could improve it by any study or elaboration, any more than if he 
were some winged warbler of the woodlands, seeking and caring for 
no other listener except the universal air which the strain made 
vocal. As he is the poet of nature, so his poetry has all the 
intermingled rudeness and luxuriance of its theme. There is no 
writer who has drunk in more of the inmost soul of his subject. 
If it be the object of descriptive poetry to present us with pic- 
tures and visions the effect of which shall vie with that of the 
originals from which they are drawn, then Thomson is the 
greatest of all descriptive poets ; for there is no other who sur- 
rounds us with so much of the truth of Nature, or makes us feel 
so intimately the actual presence and companionship of all her 
hues and fragrances. His spring blossoms and gives forth its 
beauty like a daisied meadow ; and his summer landscapes have 
all the sultry warmth and green luxuriance of June ; and his 
harvest fields and his orchards " hang the heavy head " as if 
their fruitage were indeed embrowning in the sun ; and we see 
and hear the driving of his winter snows, as if the air around us 
were in confusion with their uproar. The beauty and purity 
of imagination, also, diffused over the melodious stanzas of the 
Castle of Indolence, make that poem one of the gems of the lan- 
guage. Thomson, whose Winter, the first portion of his Seasons, 
was published in 1726, died in 1748, in his forty-eighth year. 
Two years before had died his countryman, the Eev. Eobert 
Blair, born in 1699, the author of the well-known poem in blank 
verse called The Glrave, said to have been first published in 
1743. It is remarkable for its masculine vigour of thought and 
expression, and for the imaginative solemnity with which it 
invests the most familiar truths ; and it has always been one of 
our most popular religious poems. 



379 

Armstrong ; Akenside ; Wilkie ; Glover. 

Among the more eminent, again, of the second-rate writers 
of longer poems about this date, the latter part of the reign of 
George II., immediately after the death of Pope, may be noticed 
Dr. John Armstrong, who was born in Scotland in 1709, and 
whose Art of Preserving Health, published in 1744, has the rare 
merit of an original and characteristic style, distinguished by 
raciness and manly grace ; and Dr. Mark Akenside, likewise a 
physician, the author, at the age of twenty- three, of The 
Pleasures of Imagination, published in the same year with 
Armstrong's poem, and giving another example of the treatment 
of a didactic subject in verse with great ingenuity and success. 
Akenside's rich, though diffuse, eloquence, and the store of fan- 
ciful illustration which he pours out, evidence a wonderfully full 
mind for so young a man. Neither Akenside nor Armstrong 
published any more verse after the accession of George III. ; 
though the former lived till 1770, and the latter till 1779. 
Wilkie, the author of the rhyming epic called The Epigoniad, 
who was a Scotch clergyman and professor of natural philosophy 
at St. Andrews, would also appear from the traditionary accounts 
we have of him to have been a person of some genius as well as 
learning, though in composing his said epic he seema not to have 
gone much farther for his model or fount of inspiration than to 
the more sonorous passages of Pope's Homer. The Epigoniad, 
published in 1753, can scarcely be said to have in any proper 
sense of the word long survived its author, who died in 1772. 
Nor probably was Glover's blank verse epic of Leonidas, which 
appeared so early as 1737, much read when he himself passed 
away from among men, in the year 1785, at the age of seventy- 
four — although it had had a short day of extraordinary popu- 
larity, and is a performance of considerable rhetorical merit. 
Glover, who was a merchant of London, and distinguished as a 
city political leader on the liberal side (a circumstance which 
helped the temporary success of his epic), also wrote two trage- 
dies, Boadicea, which w^as brought out in 1753; Medea, which 
appeared in 1761 : they have the reputation of being cold and 
declamatory, and have both been long ago consigned to oblivion. 
He Is best remembered for his ballad of Admiral Hosier's Ghost 
— which he wrote when he was seven-and-twenty, and was 
accustomed, it seems, to sing to the end of his life,— though 
Hannah More, who tells us she heard him sing it in his last 
days, is mistaken in saying that he was then past eighty. 



380 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Scottish Poetry. 

Thomson was the first Scotsman who won any conspicuous 
place for himself in English literature. He had been preceded, 
indeed, in the writing of English by two or three others of his 
countrymen ; by Drummond of Hawthornden, who has been 
mentioned in a preceding ]3age, and his contemporaries — the 
Earl of Stirling, who is the author of several rhyming tragedies 
and other poems, well versified, but not otherwise of much 
poetical merit, published between 1603 and 1637, the Earl of 
Ancrum, by whom we have some sonnets and other short pieces, 
and Sir Robert Ayton, to whom is commonly attributed the well- 
known song, " I do confess thon'rt smooth and fair," and who is 
also the author of a considerable number of other similar efi'usions, 
many of them of superior polish and elegance. At a later date, 
too. Sir Greorge Mackenzie, as already noticed, had written some 
English prose ; as, indeed, Drummond had also done, besides his 
poetry. But none of these writers, belonging to the century 
that followed the union of the crowns, can be considered as having 
either acquired any high or diffused reputation in his own time, 
or retained much hold upon posterity. Even Drummond is 
hardly remembered as anything more than a respectable son- 
netteer ; his most elaborate w^ork, his prose History of the 
Jameses, has passed into as complete general oblivion as the 
tragedies and epics of Lord Stirling and the Essays of Sir George 
Mackenzie. If there be any other writer born in Scotland of 
earlier date than Thomson, who has still a living and consider- 
able name among English authors, it is Bishop Burnet ; but those 
of his literary performances by which he continues to be chiefly 
remembered, however important for the facts they contain, have 
scarcely any literary value. Leighton, the eloquent archbishop 
of Glasgow, although of Scotch descent, was himself born in Lon- 
don. The poetry of Thomson was the first produce of the next 
era, in which the two countries were really made one by their 
union under one legislature, and English became the literary 
language of the one part of the island as much as of the other. 

The Scottish dialect, however, still continued to be employed 
in poetry. The great age of Scottish poetry, as we have seen, 
extends from about the beginning of the fifteenth to about the 
middle of the sixteenth centuiy, the succession of distinguished 
names comprehending, among others, those of James I., and 
Henderson, and Holland, and Henry the Minstrel, and Gawin 
Douglas, and Dunbar, and Sir David Lyndsay.* It is remarkable 
* See pp. 167—183. 



SCOTTISH POETRY. 381 

that this space of a hundred and fifty years exactly corresponds to 
the period of the decay and almost extinction of poetry in England 
which intervenes between Chaucer and Surrey. On the other 
hand, with the revival of English poetry in the latter part of the 
sixteenth century the voice of Scottish song almost died away. 
The principal names of the writers of Scottish verse that occur for 
a hundred and fifty years after the death of Lyndsay are those of 
Alexander Scot, who was Lyndsay's contemporary, but probably 
survived him, and who is the author of several short amatory 
compositions, which have procured him from Pinkerton the 
designation of the Scottish Anacreon; Sir Eichard Maitland of 
Lethington, who died at a great age in 1586, and is less 
memorable as a poet than as a collector and preserver of poetry, 
the two famous manuscript volumes in the Pepysian Library, 
in which are found the only existing copies of so many curious 
old pieces, having been compiled under his direction, although 
his own compositions, which have, with proper piety, been 
printed by the Maitland Club at Glasgow, are also of some bulk, 
and are creditable to his good feeling and good sense ; Captain 
Alexander Montgomery, whose allegory of The Cherry and the 
Slae, published in 1697, is remarkable for the facility and flow 
of the language, and long continued a popular favourite, its 
peculiar metre (which, however, is of earlier origin than this 
poem) having been on several occasions adopted by Burns ; and 
Alexander Hume, who was a clergyman and died in 1609, 
having published a volume of Hymns, or Sacred Songs, in his 
native dialect, in 1699. Other Scottish poets of the sixteenth 
century, of whom nothing or next to nothing is known except 
the names, and a few short pieces attributed to some of them, 
are John Maitland Lord Thirl stane (second son of Sir Eichard), 
Alexander Arbuthnot, who was a clergyman, Clapperton, 
Elemyng, John Blyth, Moffat, Eethy, Balnavis, Sempil, Nerval, 
Allan Watson, George Bannatyne (the writer of the Bannatyne 
manuscript in the Advocates' Library), who was a canon of the 
cathedral of Moray, and Wedderburn, the supposed author of the 
Compendious Book of Godly and Spiritual Songs, of which the 
first edition in all probability appeared in the latter part of this 
century, and also, according to one theory, of The Complaint 
of Scotland, published in 1548.* But it is possible that some 
of these names may belong to a date anterior to that of Lyndsay. 
King James, also, before his accession to the English throne, 
published in Edinburgh two collections of Scottish verse by 
himself; the first, in 1585, entitled The Essays of a Prentice in 
* See p. 191, 



382 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

the Divine Art of Poesy; the other, in 1591, His Majesty's 
Poetical Exercises at vacant hours ; but the royal inspiration is 
peculiarly weak and flat. 

In the "whole course, we believe, of the seventeenth century 
not even the name of a Scottish poet or versifier occurs. The 
next that appeared was Allan Ramsay, who was the contem- 
porary of Thomson, and must be accounted the proper successor 
of Sir David Lyndsay, after the lapse of more than a century 
and a half. Ramsay was born in 1686, and lived till 1758. 
He belongs to the order of self-taught poets, his original pro- 
fession having been that of a barber; his first published per- 
formance, his clever continuation of the old poem of Christ's 
Kirk on the Green (attributed by some to James I. of Scotland, 
by others to James V.) appeared in 1712 ; his Gentle Shepherd, 
in 1725 ; and he produced besides numerous songs and other 
shorter pieces from time to time. Ramsay's verse is in general 
neither very refined nor very imaginative, but it has always 
more or less in it of true poetic life. His lyrics, with all their 
frequent coarseness, are many of them full of rustic hilarity and 
humour ; and his well-known pastoral, though its dramatic pre- 
tensions otherwise are slender enough, for nature and truth both 
in the characters and manners may rank with the happiest com- 
positions of its class. 

The Novelists, Richardson", Fielding, Smollett. 

A very remarkable portion of the literature of the middle of the 
last century is the body of prose fiction, the authors of which 
we familiarly distinguish as the modern English novelists, and 
which in some respects may be said still to stand apart from 
everything in the language produced either before or since. If 
there be any writer entitled to step in before Richardson and 
Fielding in claiming the honour of having originated the English 
novel, it is Daniel Defoe. But, admirable as Defoe is for his 
inventive power and his art of narrative, he can hardly be said 
to have left us any diversified picture of the social life of his time, 
and he is rather a great raconteur than a novelist, strictly and 
properly so called. He identifies himself, indeed, as perfectly as 
any writer ever did, with the imaginary personages whose adven- 
tures he details; — but still it is adventures he deals with rather 
than either manners or characters. It may be observed that there 
is seldom or ever anything peculiar or characteristic in the lan- 
guage of his heroes and heroines : some of them talk, or write, 
througli whole volumes, but all in the same style ; in fact, as to 



RICHARDSON; FIELDING; SMOLLETT. 383 

tliis matter, every one of them is merely a repetition of Defoe 
himself. Nor even in professed dialogue is he happy in indi- 
vidualizing his characters by their manner of expressing them- 
selves ; there may be the employment occasionally of certain 
distinguishing phrases, but the adaptation of the speech to the 
speaker seldom goes much beyond such mere mechanical arti- 
fices ; the heart and spirit do not flash out as they do in nature ; 
we may remember Eobinson Crusoe's man Friday by his broken 
English, but it is in connexion with the fortunes of their lives 
only, of the full stream of incident and adventure upon which 
they are carried along, of the perils and perplexities in which 
they are involved, and the shifts they are put to, that we think 
of Colonel Jacque, or Moll Flanders, or even of Eobinson Crusoe 
himself. What character they have to us is all gathered from 
the circumstances in which they are placed ; very little or none 
of it from either the manner or the matter of their discourses. 
Even their conduct is for the most part the result of circum- 
stances ; any one of them acts, as well as speaks, very nearly as 
any other would have done similarly situated. Great and original 
as he is in his proper line, and admirable as the fictions with 
which he has enriched our literature are for their other merits, 
Defoe has created no character which lives in the national mind- 
no Squire Western, or Trulliber, or Parson Adams, or Strap, or 
Pipes, or Trunnion, or Lesmahago, or Corporal Trim, or Uncle 
Toby. He has made no attempt at any such delineation. It 
might be supposed that a writer able to place himself and his 
readers so completely in the midst of the imaginary scenes he 
describes would have excelled in treating a subject dramatically. 
But, in truth, his genius was not at all dramatic. With all his 
wonderful power of interesting us by the air of reality he throws 
over his fictions, and carrying us along with him whithersoever 
he pleases, he has no faculty of passing out of himself in the 
dramatic spirit, of projecting himself out of his own proper 
nature and being into those of the creations of his brain. How- 
ever strong his conception was of other things, he had no strong 
conception of character. Besides, with all his imagination and 
invention, he had little wit and no humour — no remarkable skill 
in any other kind of representation except merely that of the 
plain literal truth of things. Vivid and even creative as his 
imagination was, it was still not poetical. It looked through no 
atmosphere of ideal light at anything ; it saw nothing adorned, 
beautified, elevated above nature ; its gift was to see the reality, 
and no more. Its pictures, therefore, partake rather of the cha- 
racter of fac -similes than that of works of art in the true sense. 



384 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

On turning our eyes from his productions to those either of 
Fielding or Eichardson, we feel at once the spell of quite another 
sort of inventive or creative power. Yet no two writers could 
well be more unlike than the two we have mentioned are to 
one another both in manner and in spirit. Intellectually and 
morally, by original constitution of mind as well as in the cir- 
cumstances of their training and situation, the two great con- 
temporary novelists stood opposed the one to the other in the 
most complete contrast. Fielding, a gentleman by birth, and 
liberally educated, had been a writer for the public from the 
time he was twenty : Eichardson, who had nearly attained that 
age before Fielding came into the world (the one was born in 
1689, the other in 1707), having begun life as a mechanic, had 
spent the greater part of it as a tradesman, and had passed his 
fiftieth year before he became an author. Yet, after they had 
entered upon the same new field of literature almost together, 
they found themselves rivals upon that ground for as long as 
either continued to write. To Eichardson certainly belongs 
priority of date as a novelist : the first part of his Pamela was 
published in 1740, the conclusion in 1741 ; and Fielding's 
Joseph Andrews, originally conceived with the design of turn- 
ing Eichardson's work into ridicule, appeared in 1742. Thus, 
as if their common choice of the same species of writing, and 
their antipathies of nature and habit, had not been enough to 
divide them, it was destined that the two founders of the new 
school of fiction should begin their career by having a personal 
quarrel. For their works, notwithstanding all the remarkable 
points of dissimilarity between those of the one and those of the 
other, must still be considered as belonging to the same school 
or form of literary composition, and that a form which they had 
been the first to exemplify in our language. Unlike as Joseph 
Andrews was to Pamela, yet the two resembled each other more 
than either did any other English work of fiction. They were 
still our two first novels properly so called- — our two first 
artistically constructed epics of real life. And the identity of 
the species of fictitious narrative cultivated by the two writers 
became more apparent as its character was more completely 
developed by their subsequent publications, and each proceeded 
in proving its capabilities in his own way, without reference to 
what had been done by the other. Fielding's Jonathan Wild 
appeared in 1743 ; Eichardson's Clarissa Harlowe — the greatest 
of his works — was given to the world in 1748; and the next 
year the greatest birth of Fielding's genius — his Tom Jones — 
saw the light. Finally, Fielding's Amelia was published in 



RICHARDSON; FIELDING; SMOLLETT. 385 

1751 ; and EicTiardson's Sir Charles Grandison in 1763. Field- 
ing died at Lisbon in 1754, at the age of forty-seven; Eichard- 
son survived till 1761, but wi^ote nothing more. 

Meanwhile, however, a third writer had presented himself 
upon the same field — Smollett, whose Koderick Eandom had 
appeared in 1748, his Peregrine Pickle in 1751, and his Count 
Fathom in 1754, when the energetic Scotsman was yet only 
in his thirty-fourth year. His Sir Launcelot Greaves followed 
in 1762, and his Humphrey Clinker in 1771, in the last year of 
the author's active life. Our third English novelist is as much 
a writer sui generis as either of his two predecessors, as com- 
pletely distinguished from each of them in the general character 
of his genins as they are from each other. Of the three, Eichard- 
son had evidently by far the richest natural soil of mind ; his 
defects sprung from deficiency of cultivation; his power was 
his own in the strictest sense ; not borrowed from books, little 
aided even by experience of life, derived almost solely from 
introspection of himself and communion with his own heart. 
He alone of the three could have written what he did without 
having himself witnessed and lived through the scenes and cha- 
racters described, or something like them which only required 
to be embellished and heightened, and otherwise artistically 
treated, in order to form an interesting and striking fictitious 
representation. His fertility of invention, in the most com- 
prehensive meaning of that term, is wonderful, — supplying him 
on all occasions with a copious stream both of incident and of 
thought that floods the page, and seems as if it might so flow on 
and diffuse itself for ever. Yet it must be confessed that he has 
delineated for us rather human nature than human life — rather 
the heart and its universal passions, as modified merely by a few 
broad distinctions of temperament, of education, of external cir- 
cumstances, than those subtler idiosyncracies which constitute 
what we properly call character. Many characters, no doubt, 
there are set before us in his novels, very admirably drawn and 
discriminated : Pamela, her parents, Mr. B., Mrs. Jewkes, 
Clarissa, Lovelace, Miss Howe, Sir Charles Grandison, Miss 
Byron, Clementina, are all delineations of this description for 
the most part natural, well worked out, and supported by many 
happy touches : but (with the exception, perhaps, of the last 
mentioned) they can scarcely be called original conceptions of 
a high order, creations at once true to nature and new to litera- 
ture ; nor have they added to that population of the world of 
fiction among which every reader of books has many familiar 
acquaintances hardly less real to his fancy and feelings than any 

2 c 



386 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

lie has met with, in the actual world, and for the most part much 
more interesting. That which, besides the story, interests us in 
Eichard son's novels, is not the characters of his personages but 
their sentiments — not their modes but their motives of action — 
the anatomy of their hearts and inmost natures, which is un- 
folded to us with so elaborate an inquisition and such matchless 
skill. Fielding, on the other hand, has very little of this, and 
Smollett still less. They set before us their pictures of actual 
life in much the same way as life itself would have set them 
before us if our experience had chanced to bring us into contact 
with the particular situations and personages delineated ; we 
see, commonly, merely what we should have seen as lookers-on, 
not in the particular confidence of any of the figures in the 
scene ; there are they all, acting or talking according to their 
various circumstances, habits, and humours, and we are welcome 
to look at them and listen to them as attentively as we please ; 
but, if we want to know anything more of them than what is 
visible to all the world, we must find it out for ourselves in the 
best way we can, for neither they nor the author will ordinarily 
tell us a word of it. What both these writers have given us 
in their novels is for the most part their own actual experience 
of life, irradiated, of course, by the lights of fancy and genius, 
and so made something much more brilliant and attractive than 
it was in the reality, but still in its substance the product not 
of meditation but of observation chiefly. Even Fielding, with 
all his wit, or at least pregnancy of thought and style — for the 
quality in his writings to which we allude appears to be the 
result rather of elaboration than of instinctive perception — 
would probably have left us nothing much worth preserving 
in the proper form of a novel, if he had not had his diversified 
practical knowledge of society to draw upon and especially his 
extensive and intimate acquaintance with the lower orders of 
all classes, in painting whom he is always greatest and most at 
home. "Within that field, indeed, he is the greatest of all our 
novelists. Yet he has much more refinement of literary taste 
than either Smollett or Eichardson ; and, indeed, of the works 
of all the three, his alone can be called classical works in 
reference to their formal character. Both his style and the 
construction of his stories display a care and artifice altogether 
unknown to the others, both of whom, writing on without plan 
or forethought, appear on all occasions to have made use alike 
of the first words and the first incidents that presented them- 
selves. Smollett, a practised writer for the press, had the com- 
mand, indeed, of a style the fluency of which is far from being 



STERNE. 38? 

without force, or rhetorical parade either ; but it is animated hj 
no peculiar expressiveness, loy no graces either of art or of 
nature. His power consists in the cordiality of his conception 
and the breadth and freedom of his delineation of the humorous, 
both in character and in situation. The feeling of the humorous 
in Smollett always overpowers, or at least has a tendency to 
overpower, the merely satirical spirit ; which is not the case 
with Fielding, whose humour has generall}'' a sly vein of satire 
running through it, even when it is most gay and genial. 



Sterne. 

But he to whom belongs the finest spirit of whim among all 
our writers of this class is the immortal author of The Life and 
Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Sterne, born in Ireland in 1713, 
had already published one or two unregarded sermons when the 
first and second volumes of his most singular novel were brought 
out at York in the year 1759. The third and fourth volumes 
followed in 1761 ; the fifth and sixth in 1762; the seventh and 
eighth not till 1765 ; the ninth in 1767. The six volumes of 
his Yorick's Sermons had also come out in pairs in the intervals ; 
his Sentimental Journey appeared in 1768; and his death took 
place the same year. Sterne has been charged with imitation 
and plagiarism ; but surely originality is the last quality that 
can be denied to him. To dispute his possession of that is much 
the same as it would be to deny that the sun is luminous because 
some spots have been detected upon its surface. If Sterne has 
borrowed or stolen some few things from other writers, at least 
no one ever had a better right to do so in virtue of the" amount 
that there is in his writings of what is really his own. If he has 
been much indebted to any predecessor, it is to Eabelais ; but, 
except in one or two detached episodes, he has wholly eschewed 
the extravagance and grotesqueness in which the genius of 
Eabelais loves to disport itself, and the tenderness and humanity 
that pervade his humour are quite unlike anything in the mirth 
of Eabelais. There is not much humour, indeed, anywhere out 
of Shakespeare and Cervantes which resembles or can be com- 
pared with that of Sterne. It would be difficult to name any 
writer but one of these two who could have drawn Uncle Toby 
or Trim. Another common mistake about Sterne is, that the 
mass of what he has written consists of little better than nonsense 
or rubbish — that his beauties are but grains of gold glittering 
here and there in a heap of sand, or, at most, rare spots of green 



388 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

scattered over an arid waste. Of no writer could this be said 
with less correctness. Whatever he has done is wrought with 
the utmost care, and to the highest polish and perfection. A\ ith 
all his apparent caprices of manner, his language is throughout 
the purest idiomatic English ; nor is there, usually, a touch in 
any of his pictures that could be spared without injury to the 
effect. And, in his great work, how completely brought out, 
how exquisitely finished, is e^erj figure, from Uncle Toby, and 
Brother Shandy, and Trim, and Yorick, down to Dr. Slop, and 
Widow Wadman, and Mrs. Bridget, and Obadiah himself! Who 
would resign any one of them, or any part of any one of them ? 



Goldsmith. 

It has been observed, with truth, that, although Eichardson 
has on the whole the best claim to the title of inventor of the 
modern English novel, he never altogether succeeded in throw- 
ing off the inflation of the French romance, and representing 
human beings in the true light and shade of human nature. 
Undoubtedly the men and women of Fielding and Smollett are 
of more genuine flesh and blood than the elaborate heroes and 
heroines who figure in his pages. But both Fielding and 
Smollett, notwithstanding the fidelity as well as spirit of their 
style of drawing from real life, have for the most part confined 
themselves to some two or three departments of the wide field 
of social existence, rather abounding in strongly marked pecu- 
liarities of character than furnishing a fair representation of the 
common national mind and manners. And Sterne also, in his 
more aerial way, deals rather with the oddities and quaintnesses 
of opinion and habit that are to be met with among his country- 
men than with the broad general course of our English way 
of thinking and living. Our first genuine novel of domestic 
life is Goldsmith's Yicar of Wakefield, written in 1761, when 
its author, born in Ireland in 1728, was as yet an obscure doer of 
all work for the booksellers, but not published till 1766, when 
his name had already obtained celebrity by his poem of The 
Traveller. Assuming the grace of confession, or the advantage 
of the first word. Goldsmith himself introduces his performance 
by observing, that there are a hundred faults in it ; adding, that 
a hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. The 
case is not exactly as he puts it : the faults may have compen- 
sating beauties, but are incontrovertibly faults. Indeed, if we 
look only to what is more superficial or external in the work, 



GOLDSMITH. 389 

to the construction and conduct of the story, and even to much 
of the exhibition of manners and character, its faults are unex- 
ampled and astounding. Never was there a story put together 
in such an inartificial, thoughtless, blundering way. It is little 
better than such a "concatenation accordingly " as satisfies one 
in a dream. It is not merely that everything is brought about 
by such sudden apparitions and transformations as only happen 
at the call of Harlequin's wand. Of this the author himself 
seems to be sensible, from a sort of defence which he sets up in 
one place: *'Nor can I go on," he observes, after one of his 
sharp turns, *' without a reflection on those accidental meetings 
which, though they happen every day, seldom excite our sur- 
prise but upon some extraordinary occasion. To what a for- 
tuitous occurrence do we not owe every pleasure and convenience 
of our lives ! How many seeming accidents must unite before 
we can be clothed or fed ! The peasant must be disposed to 
labour, the shower must fall, the wind fill the merchant's sail, 
or numbers must want the usual supply." But, in addition to 
this, probability, or we might almost say possibility, is violated 
at every step with little more hesitation or compunction than in 
a fairy tale. Nothing happens, nobody acts, as things would 
happen, and as men and women would naturally act, in real 
life. Much of what goes on is entirely incredible and incom- 
prehensible. Even the name of the book seems an absurdity. 
The Vicar leaves Wakefield in the beginning of the third chapter, 
and, it must be supposed, resigns his vicarage, of which we hear 
no more; yet the family is called the family of Wakefield 
throughout. This is of a piece with the famous bull that occurs 
in the ballad given in a subsequent chapter :- — 

The dew, the blossoms on the tree, 
With charms inconstant shine ; 

Their charms were his, but, woe to me, 
Their constancy was mine. 

But why does the vicar, upon losing his fortune, give up his 
vicarage ? Why, in his otherwise reduced circumstances, does 
he prefer a curacy of fifteen pounds to a vicarage of thirty-five ? 
Are we expected to think this quite a matter of course (there is 
not a syllable of explanation), upon the same principle on which 
we are called upon to believe that he was overwhelmed with 
surprise at finding his old friend Wilmot not to be a monogamist ? 
— the said friend being a^. that time actually courting a fourth 
wife. And it is all in the same strain. The whole story of the 
two Thornhills, the uncle and nephew, is a heap of contradictions 
and absurdities. Sir William Thomhill is universally known ; 



390 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE, 

and yet in his assumed character of Burchell, without even, as 
far as appears, any disguise of his person, he passes undetected 
in a familiar intercourse of months with the tenantry of his own 
estate. If, indeed, we are not to understand something even 
beyond this — that, while all the neighbours know him to be Sir 
William, the Primroses alone never learn that fact, and still 
continue to take him for Mr. Burchell. But what, after all, is 
Burchell's real history ? Nothing that is afterwards stated con- 
firms or explains the intimation he is made unintentionally to let 
fall in one of the commencing chapters, about his early life. 
How, by-the-by, does the vicar come to know, a few chapters 
afterwards, that Burchell has really been telling his own story in 
the account he had given of Sir William Thomhill ? Compare 
chapters third and sixth. But, take any view we will, the 
uncle's treatment of his nephew remains unaccounted for. Still 
more unintelligible is his conduct in his self-adopted capacity of 
lover of one of the vicar's daughters, and guardian of the vii-tue 
and safety of both. The plainest, easiest way of saving them 
from all harm and all danger stares him in the face, and for no 
reason that can be imagined he leaves them to their fate. As for 
his accidental rescue of Sophia afterwards, the whole affair is 
only to be matched for wildness and extravagance in Jack the 
Giant-killer or some other of that class of books. It is beyond 
even the Doctor of Divinity appearing at the fair with his horse 
to sell, and in the usual forms putting him through all his paces. 
But it is impossible to enumerate all the improbabilities with 
which the story is filled. Every scene, without any exception, 
in which the squire appears involves something out of nature or 
which passes understanding; — his position in reference to his 
uncle in the first place, the whole of his intercourse with the 
clergyman's family, his dining with them attended by his two 
women and his troop of servants in their one room, at other times 
his association there with young farmer Williams (suddenly pro- 
vided by the author when wanted as a suitor for Olivia), the 
unblushing manner in which he makes his infamous proposals, 
the still more extraordinary indulgence with which they are 
forgiven and forgotten, or rather forgotten without his ever 
having asked or dreamt of asking forgiveness, all his audacious 
ruffianism in his attempts to possess himself of the two sisters at 
once, dind finally, and above all, his defence of himself to his 
uncle at their meeting in the prison, which surely entrants any- 
thing ever before attempted in decent prose or rhyme. Nor 
must that superlative pair of lovers, the vicar's eldest son George 
and Miss Arabella Wilmot, be overlooked, with the singularly 



GOLDSMITH. 391 

cool and easy way in which they pass from the most violent 
affection to the most entire indifference, and on the lady's part 
even transference of hand and heart to another, and back again 
as suddenly to mutual transport and confidence. If Goldsmith 
intended George for a representation of himself (as their adven- 
tures are believed to have been in some respects the same), we 
should be sorry to think the likeness a good one ; for he is the 
most disagreeable character in the book. His very existence 
seems to have been entirely forgotten by his family, and by the 
author, for the first three years after he left home; and the 
story would have been all the better if he had never chanced to 
turn up again, or to be thought of, at all. Was ever such a letter 
read as the one he is made in duty and affection to write to his 
father in the twenty-eighth chapter ! Yet there is that in the 
book which makes all this comparatively of little consequence ; 
the inspiration and vital power of original genius, the charm of 
true feeling, some portion of the music of the great hymn of 
nature made audible to all hearts. Notwithstanding all its 
improbabilities, the story not only amuses us while we read, but 
takes root in the memory and affections as much almost as any 
story that was ever written. In truth, the critical objections to 
which it is obnoxious hardly affect its real merits and the proper 
sources of its interest. All of it that is essential lies in the 
development of the characters of the good vicar and his family, 
and they are one and all admirably brought out. He himself, 
simple and credulous, but also learned and clear-headed, so 
guileless and affectionate, sustaining so well all fortunes, so great 
both in suffering and in action, altogether so unselfish and noble- 
minded ; his wife, of a much coarser grain, with her gooseberry- 
wine, and her little female vanities and schemes of ambition, but 
also made respectable by her love and reverence for her husband, 
her pride in, if not affection for, her children, her talent of 
management and housewifery, and the fortitude and resignation 
with which she too bears her part, in their common calamities ; 
the two girls, so unlike and yet so sister-like ; the inimitable 
Moses, with his black ribbon, and his invincibility in argument 
and bargain- making ; nor to be omitted the chubby-cheeked 
rogue little Bill, and the " honest veteran " Dick ; the homely 
happiness of that fireside, upon which worldly misfortime can 
cast hardly a passing shadow ; their little concerts, their dances ; 
neighbour Flamborough's two rosy daughters, with their red 
top-knots ; Moses's speculation in the green spectacles, and the 
vicar's own subsequent adventure (though running somewhat 
into the extravaganza style) with the same venerable arch-rogue. 



392 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

" with grey hair, and no flaps to his pocket-holes ;" the immortal 
family picture ; and, like a sudden thunderbolt falling in the 
sunshine, the flight of poor passion-driven Olivia, her few dis- 
tracted words as she stept into the chaise, " ! what will my 
poor papa do when he knows I am undone!" and the heart- 
shivered old man's cry of anguish — " Now, then, my children, 
go and be miserable ; for we shall never enjoy one hour more ;" 
— these, and other incidents and touches of the same kind, are 
the parts of the book that are remembered ; all the rest drops off, 
as so much mere husk, or other extraneous enwrapment, after we 
have read it ; and out of these we reconstruct the story, if we 
will have one, for ourselves, or, what is better, rest satisfied with 
the good we have got, and do not mind though so much truth 
and beauty will not take the shape of a story, which is after all 
the source of pleasure even in a work of fiction which is of the 
lowest importance, for it scarcely lasts after the first reading. 
Part of the charm of .this novel of Goldsmith's too consists 
in the art of writing which he has displayed in it. The style, 
always easy, transparent, harmonious, and expressive, teems with 
felicities in the more heightened passages. And, finally, the 
humour of the book is all good-humour. There is scarcely a 
touch of ill-nature or even of satire in it from beginning to end — 
nothing of either acrimony or acid. Johnson has well charac- 
terized Goldsmith in his epitaph as sive risus essent movendi sive 
lacrymcBy affectuum potens at lenis dominator — a ruler of our affec- 
tions, and mover alike of our laughter and our tears, as gentle 
as he is prevailing. With all his loveable qualities, he had 
also many weaknesses and pettinesses of personal character ; but 
his writings are as free from any ingredient of malignity, either 
great or small, as those of any man. As the author, too, of the 
Traveller and the Deserted Village, published in 1765 and 1771, 
Goldsmith, who lived till 1774, holds a distinguished place 
among the poetical writers of the middle portion of the last 
century. He had not the skyey fancy of his predecessor Collins, 
but there is an earnestness and cordiality in his poetry which 
the school of Pope, to which, in its form at least, it belongs, had 
scarcely before reached, and which make it an appropriate pre- 
lude to the more fervid song that was to burst forth among us in 
another generation. 



Churchill. 

But perhaps the writer who, if not by what he did himself, yet 
by the effects of his example, gave the greatest impulse to our 



CHURCHILL. 393 

poetry at this time, was Churcliill. Charles Churchill, bom in 
1731, published his first poem. The Eosciad, in 1761; and the 
rest of his pieces, his Apology to the Critical Eeviewers — his 
epistle to his friend Lloyd, entitled Night — The Ghost, eventually 
extended to four Books — The Prophecy of Famine — his Epistle 
to Hogarth — The Conference — The Duellist— The Author — ■ 
Gotham, in three Books — The Candidate — The Farewell — The 
Times — Independence — all within the next three years and a 
half. He was suddenly carried off by an attack of fever in 
November, 1764. If we put aside Thomson, Churchill, after all 
deductions, may be pronounced, looking to the quantity as well 
as the quality of his productions, to be the most considerable 
figure that appears in our poetry in the half- century from Pope 
to Cowper. But that is, perhaps, rather to sa}'' little for the said 
half-century than much for Churchill. All that he wrote being 
not only upon topics of the day, but addressed to the most 
sensitive or most excited passions of the mob of readers, he made 
an immense impression upon his contemporaries, which, how- 
ever, is now worn very faint. Some looked upon him as Dryden 
come to life again, others as a greater than Dryden. As for 
Pope, he was generally thought to be quite outshone or eclipsed 
by the new satirist. Yet Churchill, in truth, with great rhetorical 
vigour and extraordinary fluency, is wholly destitute of either 
poetry or wit of any high order. He is only, at the most, a 
better sort of Cleveland, not certainly having more force or pun- 
gency than that old writer, but a freer flow and broader sweep in 
his satire. Of the true fervour and fusing power of Dryden he 
has nothing, any more than he has of what is best and most 
characteristic in Pope, to whose wit his stands in the relation or 
contrast of a wooden pin to a lancet. The most successful ten 
continuous lines he ever vsrrote in the same style are certainly 
not worth the ten worst of Pope's. But, indeed, he scarcely has 
anywhere ten lines, or two lines, without a blemish. In reading 
Pope, the constant feeling is that, of its kind, nothing could be 
better; in reading Churchill, we feel that nearly everything 
might be better, that, if the thought is good, the setting is defec- 
tive, but generally that, whatever there may be of merit in 
either, there are flaws in both. 



Falconer; Beattie; Mason. 

To the present date belongs Falconer's pleasing descriptive poem, 
The Shipwreck, the truth, nature, and pathos of which, withoi^t 
much imaginative adornment, have made it a general favourite. 



394 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

It was first published in 1762, and its author, who was a native 
of Scotland, was lost at sea in 1769, in his thirty -ninth year. 
Another poem of this age, by a countryman of Falconer's, is 
Beattie's Minstrel, the first book of which was published in 1770, 
the second in 1774. The Minstrel is an harmonious and eloquent 
composition, glowing with poetical sentiment ; but its inferiority 
in the highest poetical qualities may be felt by comparing it with 
Thomson's Castle of Indolence, which is perhaps the other work 
in the language which it most nearly resembles, but which yet it 
resembles much in the same way as gilding does solid gold, or as 
coloured water might be made to resemble wine. We may also 
notice the celebrated Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, 
which, with several other effusions in the same vein, appeared in 
1773, and is now known to have been, what it was always sus- 
pected to be, the composition of Gray's friend, Mason, who 
commenced poet so early as 1748 b}'' the publication of a satire 
on the University of Oxford, entitled Isis, and afterwards pro- 
duced his tragedies of Elfrida in 1752 and Caractacus in 1759, 
and the four Books of his English Garden in 1772, 1777, 1779, 
and 1781, besides a number of odes and other shorter pieces, 
some of them not till towards the close of the century. Mason, 
who died, at the age of seventy-two, in 1797, enjoyed in his day 
a great reputation, which is now become very small. His satiric 
verse is in the manner of Pope, but wdthout the wit ; and the 
staple of the rest of his poetry too is mostly words. 



The Wartons; Percy: Chatterton; Macpherson. 

There is much more of fancy and true poetry, though less 
sound and less pretension, in the compositions of Thomas Warton, 
who first made himself known by a spirited reply to Mason's Isis 
in 1749, when he was only a young man of twenty-one, and 
afterwards produced many short pieces, all evidencing a genuine 
poetic eye and taste. Thomas Warton, however, who lived till 
1790, chiefly owes the place he holds in our literature to his 
prose works — his Observations on the Fairy Queen, his edition 
of the Minor Poems of Milton, and, above all, his admirable 
History of English Poetiy, which, unfinished as it is, is still 
perhaps our greatest work in the department of literary history. 
Of the three quarto volumes the first appeared in 1774, the 
second in 1778, the last in 1781. Dr. Joseph Warton, the elder 
brother of Thomas, is also the writer of some agreeable verses ; 
but the book by which his name will live is his Essay on the 



CHATTERTON; MACPHERSON. 395 

Genius and Writings of Pope, the first volume of which was 
published, anonymously, in 1756, the second not till 1782. He 
died in 1800, in his seventy-eighth year. 

The Wartons may be regarded as the founders of a new school 
of poetic criticism in this country, which, romantic rather than 
classical in its spirit (to employ a modern nomenclature), and 
professing to go to nature for its principles instead of taking 
them on trust from the practice of the Greek and Eoman poets, 
or the canons of their commentators, assisted materially in guid- 
ing aSi well as strengthening the now reviving love for our older 
national poetry. But perhaps the publication which was as 3'et 
at once the most remarkable product of this new taste, and the 
most effective agent in its diffusion, was Percy's celebrated Ee- 
liques of Ancient English Poetry, which first appeared in 1765. 
The reception of this book was the same that what is natural and 
true always meets with when brought into fair competition with 
the artificial ; that is to say, when the latter is no longer new any 
more than the former : — 

*' As one who, long in populous city pent, 
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe 
Among the pleasant villages and farms 
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight, 
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine, 
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound ;" 

such pleasure took the reader of those rude old ballads in their 
simplicity, directness, and breezy freshness and force, thus sud- 
denly coming upon him after being sated with mere polish and 
ornament. And connected with the same matter is the famous 
imposture of Rowley's poems, by which a boy of seventeen, the 
marvellous Chatterton, deceived in the first instance a large 
portion of the public, and, after the detection of the fraud, secured 
to himself a respectable place among the original poets of his 
country. Chatterton, who terminated his existence by his own 
hand in August, 1770, produced the several imitations of ancient 
English poetr}'- which he attributed to Thomas Rowley, a monk 
of the fifteenth century, in that and the preceding year. But 
this was the age of remarkable forgeries of this description; 
Chatterton's poems of Rowley having been preceded, and perhaps 
in part suggested, by Macpherson's poems of Ossian. The first 
specimens of the latter were published in 1760, under the title 
of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of 
Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language ; and 
they immediately excited both an interest and a controversy, 
neither the one nor the other of which has quite died away even 



396 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

to the present hour. One circumstance, which has contributed 
to keep up the dispute about Ossian so much longer than that 
about liowley, no doubt, is, that there was some small portion of 
truth mixed up with Macpherson's deception, whereas there was 
none at all in Chatterton's ; but the Ossianic poetry, after all 
that has been said about its falsehood of style and substance as 
well as of pretension, making it out to be thus a double lie, must 
still have some qualities wonderfully adapted to allure the 
popular taste. Both Chatterton and Macpherson wrote a quantity 
of ^modern English verse in their own names ; but nothing either 
did in this way was worth much : they evidently felt most at 
ease in their masks. 



Dramatic Writers. 



The dramatic literature of the earlier part of the reign of 
George III. is very voluminous, but consists principally of 
comedies and farces of modern life, all in prose. Home, indeed, 
the author of Douglas, which came out in 1757, followed that 
first successful effort by about half a dozen other attempts in the 
same style, the last of which, entitled Alfred, was produced in 
1778 ; but they were all failures. Horace Walpole's great 
tragedy, the Mysterious Mother, although privately printed in 
1768, was never acted, and was not even published till many years 
after. The principal writers whose productions occupied the stage 
were Goldsmith, Garrick, and Foote, who all died in the earlier 
part of the reign of George III. ; and Macklin, Murphy, Cumber- 
land, Colman, Mrs. Cowley, and Sheridan, who mostly survived 
till after the commencement of the present century. Goldsmith's 
two capital comedies of the Good-Natured Man, and She 
Stoops to Conquer, were brought out, the former in 1768, the 
latter in 1773. But the most brilliant contributions made to 
our dramatic literature in this age were Sheridan's celebrated 
comedies of The Kivals, brought out in 1775, when the author 
was only in his twenty-fifth year, The Duenna, which followed 
the same year, and The School for Scandal, which crowned the 
reputation of the modern Congreve, in 1777. After all that had 
been written, indeed, meritoriously enough in many instances, by 
his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, these plays of 
Sheridan's were the only additions that had yet been made to the 
classic comedy of Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar; and 
perhaps we may say that they are still the last it has received. 
Sheridan's wit is as polished as Congreve's, and its flashes, if not 
quite so quick and dazzling, have a softer, a more liquid light ; 



FEMALE WRITERS. 397 

he may be said to stand between the higbly artificial point and 
concentration of Congreve and the Irish ease and gaiety of 
Farquhar, wanting, doubtless, what is most characteristic of 
either, but also combining something of each. Sheridan had 
likewise produced all his other dramatic pieces — The Trip to 
Scarborough, The Critic, &c. — before 1780 ; although he lived for 
thirty-six years after that date. 



Female Writees. 



The direction of so large a portion of the writing talent of this 
age to the comic drama is an evidence of the extended diffusion 
of literary tastes and accomplishments among the class most con- 
versant with those manners and forms of social life which chiefly 
supply the materials of modern comedy. To this period has been 
sometimes assigned the commencement of the pursuit of literature 
as a distinct profession in England ; now, too, we may say, began 
its domestic cultivation among us — the practice of writing for 
the public as the occupation and embellishment of a part of that 
leisure which necessarily abounds in an advanced state of society, 
not only among persons possessing the means of living without 
exertion of any kind, but almost throughout the various grades 
of those who are merely raised above the necessity of labouring 
with their bands. Another indication of the same thing is the great 
increase that now took place in the number of female authors. 
To the names of Mrs. Cowley, Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. Brooke, Mrs. 
Lennox, Miss Sophia Lee, and Miss Frances Burney, afterwards 
Madame D'Arblay, whose two first novels of Evelina and Cecilia 
appeared, the former in 1777, the latter in 1782, may be added, 
as distinguished in other kinds of writing than plays and novels, 
blind Anna Williams, Dr. Johnson's friend, whose volume of 
Miscellanies in prose and verse was published in 1766; the 
learned Miss Elizabeth. Carter, whose translation of Epictetus, 
however, and we believe all her other works, had appeared 
before the commencement of the reign of George III., although 
she lived till the year 1806 ; her friend Miss Catherine Talbot, 
the writer of a considerable quantity both of prose and verse, 
now forgotten ; Mrs. Montagu (originally Miss Elizabeth Eobin- 
son), the pupil of Dr. Conyers Middleton, and the founder of the 
Blue Stocking Club, whose once famous Essay on the Writings 
and Genius of Shakespeare was published in 1769, and who 
survived till the year 1800 ; Mrs. Chapone (Miss Hester Mulso), 
another friend of Miss Carter, and the favourite correspondent of 
Samuel Eichardson, whose Letters on the Improvement of the 



398 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Mind appeared in 1773 ; Mrs. Macaulay (originally Miss Catherine 
Sawbridge, finally Mrs. Graham), the notorious republican histo- 
rian and pamphleteer, whose History of England from the Acces- 
sion of James I. to the Restoration was published in a succession 
of volumes between the years 1763 and 1771, and then excited 
much attention, though now neglected; and the other female 
democratic writer, Miss Helen Maria Williams, who did not, 
however, begin to figure as a politician till after the French Ee- 
volution, her only publications that fall to be noticed in this 
place being some volumes of verse which she gave to the world 
in 1782 and the two or three following years. Mrs. Hannah 
More, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and 
some other female writers who did not obtain the height of their 
reputation till a later date, had also entered upon the career of 
authorship within the first quarter of a century of the reign of 
George III. And to the commencement of that reign is to be 
assigned perhaps the most brilliant contribution from a female 
pen that had yet been added to our literature, the collection of 
the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which, although 
written many years before, were first published in 1763, about a 
year after Lady Mary's death. The fourth volume, indeed, did 
not appear till 1767. 

Periodical Essayists. 

To the latter part of the reign of George IT. belongs the revival 
of the Periodical Essay, which formed so distinguishing a feature 
of our literature in the age of Anne. Political writing, indeed, 
in this form had been carried on from the era of the Examiner, 
and the Englishman, and the Freeholder, and Defoe's Review 
and Mercator, and the British Merchant, with little, if any inter- 
mission, in various publications ; the most remarkable being The 
Craftsman, in which Bolingbroke was the principal writer, and 
the papers of which, as first collected and reprinted in seven 
volumes, extend from the 5th of December, 1726, to the 22nd of 
May, 1731 ; nor was the work dropped till it had gone on for 
some years longer. Some attempts had even been made during 
this interval to supply the place of the Tatler, Spectator, and 
Guardian, by periodical papers, ranging, in the same strain, over 
the general field of morals and manners : Ambrose Philips, for 
instance, and a number of his friends, in the year 1718 began the 
publication of a paper entitled " The Free-thinker, or Essays on 
Ignorance, Superstition, Bigotry, Enthusiasm, Craft, &c., inter- 
mixed with several pieces of wit and humour designed to restore 



PERIODICAL ESSAYISTS. 399 

the deluded part of mankind to the use of reason and common 
sense," which attracted considerable attention at the time, and 
was kept up till the numbers made a book of three volumes, 
which were more than once reprinted. The Museum was another 
similar work, which commenced in 1746, and also ran to three 
volumes — Horace Walpole, Akenside, the two Wartons, and 
other eminent writers being among the contributors; but nothing 
of this kind that was then produced has succeeded in securing 
for itself a permanent place in our literature. The next of our 
periodical works after The Guardian that is recognized as one of 
the classics of the language is The Eambler, the first number of 
which appeared on Tuesday, the 20th of March, 1750, the last 
(the 208th) on Saturday, the 14th of March, 1752, and all the 
papers of which, at the rate of two a week, with the exception 
only of three or four, were the composition of Samuel Johnson, 
who may be said to have first become generally known as a 
writer through this publication. The Eambler was succeeded 
by The Adventurer, edited and principally written by Dr. 
Hawkesworth, which was also published twice a week, the first 
number having appeared on Tuesday, the 7th of November, 1752, 
the last (the 139th) on Saturday, the 9th of March, 1754. Mean- 
while The World, a weekly paper, had been started under the 
conduct of Edward Moore, the author of the Fables for the 
Female Sex, the tragedy of The Gamester and other dramatic 
productions, assisted by Lord Lyttelton, the Earls of Chesterfield, 
Bath, and Cork, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, and other con- 
tributors: the first number appeared on Thursday, the 4th of 
January, 1753; the 209th, and last, on the 30th of December, 
1756. And contemporary with The World, during a part of this 
space, was The Connoisseur, established and principally written 
by George Colman, in conjunction with Bonnell Thornton, a 
writer possessed of considerable wit and humour, which, how- 
ever, he dissipated for the most part upon ephemeral topics, 
being only now remembered for his share in a translation of 
Plautus, also undertaken in concert with his friend Colman, the 
first two of the five volumes of which were published in 1766, 
two years before his death, at the age of forty-four. The Con- 
noisseur was, like The World, a weekly publication, and it was 
continued in 140 numbers, from Thursda}'', the 31st of January, 
1754, to the 30th of September, 1756. Mrs. Frances Brooke's 
weekly periodical work entitled The Old Maid, which subsisted 
from November, 1755, to July in the following year, is not usually 
admitted into the collections of the English essayists. The next 
publication of this class which can be said still to hold a place 



400 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

in our literature is Jolinson's Idler, which appeared once a week 
from Saturday, the 15th of April, 1758, to Saturday, the 5th of 
April, 1760. And with The Idler closes what may be called the 
second age of the English periodical essayists, which commences 
with The Eambler, and extends over the ten years from 1750 to 
1760, the concluding decade of the reign of George II. After 
this occurs another long interval, in which that mode of writing 
was dropped, or at least no longer attracted either the favour of 
the public or the ambition of the more distinguished literary 
talent of the day ; for no doubt attempts still continued to be 
made, with little or no success, by obscure scribblers, to keep 
up what had lately been so popular and so graced by eminent 
names. But we have no series of periodical papers of this 
time, of the same character with those already mentioned, that is 
still reprinted and read. Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, 
occupied as it is with the adventures and observations of an indi- 
vidual, placed in very peculiar circumstances, partakes more of 
the character of a novel than of a succession of miscellaneous 
papers ; and both the letters composing that work and the other 
delightful essays of the same writer were published occasionally, 
not periodically or at regular intervals, and only as contributions 
to the newspapers or other journals of the day, — not by them- 
selves, like the numbers of the Spectator, the Eambler, and the 
other works of that description that have been mentioned. Our 
next series of periodical essays, properly so called, was that 
which began to be published at Edinburgh, under the name of 
The Mirror, on Saturday, the 23rd of January, 1779, and was 
continued at the rate of a number a week till the 27ih of May, 
1780. The conductor and principal writer of The Mirror was 
the late Henry Mackenzie, who died in Edinburgh, at the age of 
eighty-six, in 1831, the author of The Man of Feeling, published 
anonymously in 1771, The Man of the World, 1773, and Julia de 
Eoubigne, 1777, novels after the manner of Sterne, which are 
still universally read, and which have much of the grace and 
delicacy of style as well as of the pathos of that great master, 
although without any of his rich and peculiar humour. The 
Mirror was succeeded, after an interval of a few years, by The 
Lounger, also a weekly paper, the first number of which appeared 
on Saturday, the 5th of February, 1785, Mackenzie being again 
the leading contributor; the last (the 101st) on the 6th of 
January, 1787. But with these two publications the spirit of 
periodical essay-writing, in the style first made famous by Steele 
and Addison, expired also in Scotland, as it had already done a 
quarter of a century before in England. 



401 

Political Writing. ^Wilkes ; Junius. 

A totter excitement, in trutli, had dulled the pnblic taste to 
the charms of those ethical and critical disquisitions, whether 
grave or gay, which it had heretofore found sufficiently stimu- 
lating ; the violent war of parties, which, after a lull of nearly 
twenty years, was resumed on the accession of George III., made 
political controversy the only kind of writing that would now go 
down with the generality of readers ; and first Wilkes's famous 
North Briton, and then the yet more famous Letters of Junius, 
came to take the place of the Eamblers and Idlers, the Adven- 
turers and Connoisseurs. The North Briton, the JBrst number of 
which appeared on Saturday, the 5th of June, 1762, was started 
in opposition to The Briton, a paper set up by Smollett in defence 
of the government on the preceding Saturday, the 29th of May, 
the day on which Lord Bute had l3een nominated first lord of 
the Treasury. Smollett and Wilkes had been friends up to this 
time ; but the opposing papers were conducted in a spirit of the 
bitterest hostility, till the discontinuance of The Briton on the 
]2th of February, 1763, and the violent extinction of The North 
Briton on the 23rd of April following, fifteen days after the 
resignation of Bute, with the publication of its memorable " No. 
Forty-five." The celebrity of this one paper has preserved the 
memory of the North Briton to our day, in the same manner as 
in its own it produced several reimpressions of the whole work, 
which otherwise would probably have been as speedily and com- 
pletely forgotten as the rival publication, and as the Auditors and 
Monitors, and other organs of the two factions, that in the same 
contention helped to fill the air with their din for a season, and 
then were heard of no more than any other quieted noise. 
Wilkes's brilliancy faded away when he proceeded to commit his 
thoughts to paper, as if it had dissolved itself in the ink. Like 
all convivial wits, or shining talkers, he was of course indebted 
for much of the effect he produced in society to the promptitude 
and skill with which he seized the proper moment for saying his 
good things, to the surprise produced by the suddenness of the 
flash, and to the characteristic peculiarities of voice, action, 
and manner with which the jest or repartee was set off, and 
which usually serve as signals or stimulants to awaken the sense 
of the ludicrous before its expected gratification comes ; in 
writing, little or nothing of all this could be brought into play ; 
but still some of Wilkes's colloquial impromptus that have been 
preserved are so perfect, considered in themselves, and without 
regard to the readiness with which they may have been struck 

2 D 



402 ENGLISH LITERATURlL AND LANGUAGE. 

out, — are so true and deep, and evince so keen a feeling at once 
of the ridiculous and of the real, — that one wonders at finding so 
little of the same kind of power in his more deliberate efforts. 
In all his published writings that we have looked into — and, 
what with essays, and pamphlets of one kind and another, they 
fill a good many volumes — we scarcely recollect anything that 
either in matter or manner rises above the veriest commonplace, 
unless perhaps it be a character of Lord Chatham, occurring in a 
letter addressed to the Duke of Grafton, some of the biting things 
in which are impregnated with rather a subtle venom. A few of 
his verses also have some fancy and elegance, in the style of 
Carew and Waller. But even his private letters, of which two 
collections have been published, scarcely ever emit a sparkle. 
And his House of Commons speeches, which he wrote before- 
hand and got by heart, are equally unenlivened. It is evident, 
indeed, that he had not intellectual lung enough for any pro- 
tracted exertion or display. The soil of his mind was a hungry, 
unproductive gravel, with some gems imbedded in it. The 
author of the Letters of Junius made his debut about four years 
after the expiration of The North Briton, what is believed to be 
his first communication having appeared in the Public Advertiser 
on the 28th of April, 1767 ; but the letters, sixty -nine in number, 
signed Junius, and forming the collection vn.th which every 
reader is familiar, extend only over the space from the 21st of 
January, 1769, to the 2nd of November, 1771. Thus it appears 
that this celebrated writer had been nearly two years before the 
public before he attracted any considerable attention ; a proof 
that the polish of his style was not really the thing that did 
most to bring him into notoriety ; for, although we may admit 
that the composition of the letters signed Junius is more elaborate 
and sustained than that of the generality of his contributions to 
the same newspaper under the name of Brutus, Lucius, Atticus, 
and Mnemon, yet the difference is by no means so great as to be 
alone sufficient to account for the prodigious sensation at once 
excited by the former, after the slight regard with which the 
latter had been received for so long a time. What, in the first 
instance at least, more than his rhetoric, made the unknown 
Junius the object of universal interest, and of very general 
terror, was undoubtedly the quantity of secret intelligence he 
showed himself to be possessed of, combined with the unscru- 
pulous boldness with which he was evidently prepared to use it. 
As has been observed, "ministers found, in these letters, proofs 
of some enemy, some spy, being amongst them." It was im- 
mediately perceived in the highest circle of political society that 



JUNIUS 403 

the writer was either actually one of the members of the govern- 
raent, or a person who by some means or other had found access 
to the secrets of the government. And this suspicion, generally 
diffused, would add tenfold interest to the mystery of the author- 
ship of the letters, even where the feeling which it had excited 
was one of mere curiosity, as it would be, of course, with the 
mass of the public. But, although it was not his style alone, or 
even chiefly, that made Junius famous, it is probably that, more 
than anything else, which has preserved his fame to our day. 
More even than the secret, so long in being penetrated, of his 
real name : that might have given occasion to abundance of con- 
jecture and speculation, like the problem of the Iron Mask and 
other similar enigmas ; but it would not have prompted the 
reproduction of the letters in innumerable editions, and made 
them, what they long were, one of the most popular and generally 
read books in the language, retaining their hold upon the public 
mind to a degree which perhaps never was equalled by any other 
literary production having so special a reference, in the greater 
part of it, to topics of a temporary nature. The history of litera- 
ture attests, as has been well remarked, that power of expression 
is a surer preservative of a writer's popularity than even strength 
of thought itself; that a book in which the former exists in a 
remarkable degree is almost sure to live, even if it should have 
very little else to recommend it. The style of Junius is wanting 
in some of the more exquisite qualities of eloquent writing ; it has 
few natural graces, little variety, no picturesqueness ; but still it 
is a striking and peculiar style, combining the charm of high 
polish with great nerve and animation, clear and rapid, and at the 
same time sonorous, — masculine enough, and yet making a very 
imposing display of all the artifices of antithetical rhetoric. As for 
the spirit of these famous compositions, it is a remarkable attesta- 
tion to the author's power of writing that they were long univer- 
sally regarded as dictated by the very genius of English libeiiy, 
and as almost a sort of Bible, or heaven-inspired exposition, of 
popular principles and rights. They contain, no doubt, many 
sound maxims, tersely and vigorously expressed ; but of profound 
or farsighted political philosophy, or even of ingenious dis- 
quisition having the semblance of philosophy, there is as little 
in the Letters of Junius as there is in the Diary of Dodington or 
of Pepys ; and, as for the writer's principles, they seem to be as 
much the product of mere temper, and of his individual animosi- 
ties and spites, as even of his partisan habits and passions. He 
defends the cause of liberty itself in the spirit of tyranny ; there 
is no generosity, or even common fairness, in his mode of com- 



404 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

bating ; the newest lie, or private scandal, of the day serves as 
well, and as frequently, as anything else to point his sarcasm, or 
to arm with its vivid lightning the thunder of declamatory in- 
vective that resounds through his pages. 



Johnson. 

The character of Junius was drawn, while the mysterious 
shadow was still occupying the public gaze with its handwiiting 
upon the wall, b}^ one of the most distinguished of his contem- 
poraries, in a publication which made a considerable noise at the 
time, but is now very much forgotten : — " Junius has sometimes 
made his satire felt ; but let not injudicious admiration mistake 
the venom of the shaft for the vigour of the bow. He has some- 
times sported with lucky malice ; but to him that knows his 
company it is not hard to be sarcastic in a mask. \\ hile he 
walks, like Jack the Giant-killer, in a coat of "darkness, he may 

do much mischief with little strength Junius burst 

into notice with a blaze of impudence which has rarely glared 
upon the world before, and drew the rabble after him as a 
monster makes a show. When he had once provided for his 
safety by impenetrable secrecy, he had nothing to combat but 
truth and justice — enemies whom he knows to be feeble in the 
dark. Being then at liberty to indulge himself in all the immu- 
nities of invisibility ; out of the reach of danger, he has been 
bold ; out of the reach of shame, he has been confident. As a 
rhetorician, he has had the art of persuading when he seconded 
desire ; as a reasoner, he has convinced those who had no doubt 
before ; as a moralist, he has taught that virtue may disgrace ; 
and, as a patriot, he has gratified the mean by insults on the high. 
Finding sedition ascendant, he has been able to advance it ; find- 
ing the nation combustible, he has been able to inflame it 

It is not by his liveliness of imagery, his pungency of periods, or 
his fertility of allusions that he detains the cits of London and 
the boors of Middlesex. Of style and sentiment they take no 
cognizance : they admire him for virtues like their own, for con- 
tempt of order and violence of outrage, for rage of defamation 
and audacity of falsehood Junius is an unusual pheno- 
menon, on which some have gazed with wonder, and some with 
terror ; but wonder and terror are transitory passions. He will 
soon be more closely viewed, or more attentively examined ; and 
what folly has taken for a comet, that from his flaming hair shook 
pestilence and war, inquiry will find to be only a meteor formed 



JOHNSOX. 405 

by the vapours of putrefying democracy, and kindled into flame 
by the effervescence of interest struggling with conviction ; 
which, after having plunged its followers into a bog, will leave 
us inquiring why we regard it." Thus wrote, in his ponderous 
but yet vigorous way, Samuel Johnson, in his pamphlet entitled 
Thoughts on the late Ti'ansactions respecting Falkland's Islands, 
published in 1771, in answer, as is commonly stated, to Junius's 
Forty-second Letter, dated the 30th of Januaiy in that year. 
Junius, although he continued to write for a twelvemonth longer, 
never took any notice of this attack ; and Mrs. Piozzi tells us that 
Johnson " often delighted his imagination with the thoughts of 
having destroyed Junius." The lively lady, however, is scarcely 
the best authority on the subject of Johnson's thoughts, although 
we may yield a qualified faith to her reports of what he actually 
said and did. He may, probably enough, have thought, and said 
too, that he had beaten or silenced Junius, referring to the 
question discussed in his unanswered pamphlet ; although, on the 
other hand, it does not appear that Junius was in the habit of 
ever noticing such general attacks as this : he replied to some of 
the writers who addressed him in the columns of the Public 
Advertiser, the newspaper in which his own communications 
were published, but he did not think it necessary to go forth to 
battle with any of the other pamphleteers by whom he was 
assailed, any more than with Johnson. 

The great lexicographer winds up his character of Junius by 
remarking that he cannot think his style secure from criticism, 
and that his expressions are often trite, and his periods feeble. 
The style of Junius, nevertheless, was probably to a considerable 
extent formed upon Johnson's own. It had some strongly 
marked features of distinction, but yet it resembles the John- 
sonian style much more than it does that of any other writer in 
the language antecedent to Johnson. Bom in 1709, Johnson, 
after having while still resident in the country commenced his 
connexion with the press by some work in the way of translation 
and magazine writing, came to London along with his friend and 
pupil, the afterwards celebrated David Garrick, in March, 1737 ; 
and forthwith entered upon a career of authorship which extends 
over nearly half a century. His poem of London, an imitation 
of the Third Satire of Juvenal, appeared in 1738 ; his Life of 
Savage, in a separate form, in 1744 (having been previously 
published in the Gentleman's Magazine) ; his poem entitled The 
Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire, 
in 1749 ; his tragedy of Irene (written before he came up to 
London) the same year ; The Eambler, as already mentioned, 



406 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

between March, 1750, and March, 1752; his Dictionary of the 
English Language in 1755 ; The Idler between April, 1758, and 
April, 1760 ; his Easselas in 1759 ; his edition of Shakespeare in 
1765 ; his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1775; 
his Lives of the Poets in 1781 ; the intervals between these more 
remarkable efforts having given birth to many magazine articles, 
verses, and pamphlets, which cannot be here enumerated. His 
death took place on the 13th of December, 1784. • All the works 
the titles of which have been given may be regarded as having 
taken and kept their places in onr standard literature ; and they 
form, in quantity at least, a respectable contribution from a single 
mind. But Johnson's mind is scarcely seen at its brightest if we 
do not add to the productions of his own pen the record of his 
colloquial wit and eloquence preserved by his admirable biogra- 
pher, Boswell, whose renowned work first appeared, in two 
volumes quarto, in 1790 ; having, however, been preceded by 
the Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides, which was published 
the year after Johnson's death. It has been remarked, with 
truth, that his own works and Boswell' s Life of him together 
have preserved a more complete portraiture of Johnson, of his 
intellect, his opinions, his manners, his whole man inward and 
outward, than has been handed down from one age to another of 
any other individual that ever lived. Certainly no celebrated 
figure of any past time still stands before our eyes so distinctly 
embodied as he does. If we will try, we shall find that all others 
are shadows, or mere outlines, in comparison ; or, they seem to 
skulk about at a distance in the shade, while he is there fronting 
us in the full daylight, so that we see not only his worsted 
stockings and the metal buttons on his brown coat, but every 
feature of that massive countenance, as it is solemnized by medi- 
tation or lighted up in social converse, as his whole frame rolls 
about in triumphant laughter, or, as Cumberland saw the tender- 
hearted old man, standing beside his friend Garrick's open grave, at 
the foot of Shakespeare's monument, and bathed in tears. A noble 
heroic nature was that of this Samuel Johnson, beyond all con- 
troversy : not only did his failings lean to virtue's side— his very 
intellectual weaknesses and prejudices had something in them of 
strength and greatness ; they were the exuberance and excess of 
a rich mind, not the stinted growth of a poor one. There was no 
touch of meanness in him : rude and awkward enough he was in 
many points of mere demeanour, but he had the soul of a prince 
in real generosity, refinement, and elevation. Of a certain kind 
of intellectual faculty, also, his endowment was very high. His 
quickness of penetration, and readiness in every way, were pro- 



JOHNSON. ■ 407 

bably as great as had ever been combined with the same solid 
qualities of mind. Scarcely before had there appeared so 
thoughtful a sage, and so grave a moralist, with so agile and 
sportive a wit. Earely has so prompt and bright a wit been 
accompanied by so much real knowledge, sagacity, and weight 
of matter. But, as we have intimated, this happy union of 
opposite kinds of power was most complete, and only produced 
its. full effect, in his colloquial displaj^s, when, excited and 
unformalized, the man was really himself, and his strong nature 
forced its way onward without regard to anything but the im- 
mediate object to be achieved. In writing he is still the strong 
man, working away valiantly, but, as it were, with fetters upon 
his limbs, or a burden on his back ; a sense of the conA^ention- 
alities of his position seems to oppress him ; his st3de becomes 
artificial and ponderous ; the whole process of his intellectual 
exertion loses much of its elasticity and life ; and, instead of hard 
blows and flashes of flame, there is too often, it must be confessed, 
a mere raising of clouds of dust and the din of inflated common- 
place. Yet, as a writer, too, there is much in Johnson that is of 
no common character. It cannot be said that the world is 
indebted to him for many new truths, but he has given novel and 
often forcible and elegant expression to some old ones ; the spirit 
of his philosophy is never other than manly and high-toned, as 
well as moral ; his critical speculations, if not always very pro- 
found, are frequently acute and ingenious, and in manner 
generally lively, not seldom brilliant. Indeed, it may be said 
of Johnson, with all his faults and shortcomings, as of every man 
of true genius, that he is rarel}^ or ever absolutely dull. Even 
his Eamblers, which we hold to be the most indigestible of his 
productions, are none of them mere leather or prunello ; and his 
higher efforts, his Easselas, his Preface to Shakespeare, and many 
passages in his Lives of the Poets, are throughout instinct with 
animation, and full of an eloquence which sometimes rises almost 
to poetry. Even his peculiar style, whatever we may allege 
against it, bears the stamp of the man of genius; it was 
thoroughly his own; and it not only reproduced itself, with. 
variations, in the writings of some of the most distinguished of 
his contemporaries, from Junius's Letters to Macpherson's 
Ossian, but, whether for good or for evil, has perceptibly 
influenced our literature, and even in some degree the progress 
of the language, onwards to the present day. Some of the cha- 
racteristics of the Johnsonian style, no doubt, may be found in 
older writers, but, as a whole, it must be regarded as the inven- 
tion of Johnson. No sentence-making at once so uniformly 



408 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

clear and exact, and so elaborately stately, measured, and 
sonorous, had proceeded habitually from any previous English 
pen. The pomposity and inflation of Johnson's composition 
abated considerably in his o^vn later writings, and, as the 
cumbering flesh fell off, the nerve and spirit increased : the 
most happily executed parts of the Lives of the Poets offer almost 
a contrast to the oppressive rotundity of the Eamblers, prodiiced 
thirty years before ; and some eminent writers of a subsequent 
date, who have yet evidently formed their style upon his, have 
retained little or nothing of what, to a superficial inspection, 
seem the most marked characteristics of his manner of expres- 
sion. Indeed, as we have said, there is perhaps no subsequent 
English prose-writer upon whose style that of Johnson has been 
altogether without its effect.* 



Burke. 

But the gi-eatest, undoubtedly, of all our wi'iters of this age 
was Burke, one of the most remarkable men of any age. 
Edmund Burke was born in Dublin, in 1730 ; but he came over 
in 1760 to the British metropolis, and from this time he mostly 
resided in England till his death, in 1797. In 1756 he published 
his celebrated Vindication of Natural Society, an imitation of the 
style, and a parody on the philosophy, of Lord Bolingbroke ; 
and the same year his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of 
our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In 1757 appeared 
anonymously his Account of the European Settlements in 
America. In 1759 came out the first volume of The Annual 
Eegister, of which he is known to have written, or superintended 
the writing of, the historical part for several years. His public 
life commenced in 1761, with the appointment of private secretary 
to the chief secretary for Ireland, an o£6ce which carried him 
back for about four years to his native country. In 1766 he 
became a member of the English House of Commons ; and from 
that date almost to the hour of his death, besides his exertions as 
a front figuie in the debates and other business of parliament, 
from which he did not retire till 1794, he continued to dazzle 
the world by a succession of political writings such as certainly 
had never before been equalled in brilliancy and power. V\ e 
can mention oiAj those of greatest note : — his Thoughts on the 

* Every reader who takes any interest in Johnson will remember the bril- 
liant papers of Lord Macanlay in the Edinburgh Eeview, for September, 1831, 
and Mr. Carlyle, in the twenty-eighth number of Eraser's Magazine, for 
April, 1832. 



BUKKE. 409 

Cause of the Present Discontents, pnblislied in 1770 ; his Reflec- 
tions on the Eevolution in France, published in 1790 ; his Appeal 
from the Kew to the Old Whigs, in 1792 ; his Letter to a Xoble 
Lord on his Pension, in 1796 ; his Letters on a Eegicide Peace, 
in 1796 and 1797; his Observations on the Conduct of the 
Minority, in 1797 ; besides his several great speeches, revised 
and sent to the press by himself ; that on American Taxation, in 
177-1; that on Conciliation with America, in 1775; that on the 
Economical Eeform Bill, in 1780 ; that delivered in the Guild- 
hall at Bristol previous to his election, the same year ; that on 
Mr. Fox's India Bill, in 1783 ; and that on the Kabob of Arcot's 
Debts, in 1785. Those, perhaps the most splendid of all, which 
he delivered at the bar of the House of Lords in 1788 and 1789, 
on the impeachment of Mr. Hastings, have also been printed 
since his death from his own manuscript. 

Burke was our first, and is still our greatest, writer on the 
philosophy of practical politics. The mere metaphysics of that 
science, or what we may call by that term for want of a better, 
meaning thereby all abstract speculation and theorizing on the 
general subject of government without reference to the actual 
circumstances of the particular country and people to be go- 
verned, he held from the beginning to the end of his life in 
undisguised, perhaps in undue, contempt. This feeling is as 
strongly manifested in his very first publication, his covert 
attack on Bolingbroke, as either in his writings and speeches 
on the contest with the American colonies or in those of the 
French Eevolution. He was, as we have said, emphatically 
a practical politician, and, above all, an English politician. In 
discussing questions of domestic politics, he constantly refused 
to travel beyond the landmarks of the constitution as he found 
it established ; and the views he took of the politics of other 
countries were as far as possible regulated by the same principle. 
The question of a levolution, in so far as England was con- 
cerned, he did not hold to be one with which he had anything to 
do. Kot only had it never been actually presented to him by 
the circumstances of the time ; he did not conceive that it ever 
could come before him. He was, in fact, no believer in the 
possibility of any sudden and complete re-edification of the 
institutions of a great country ; he left such transformations to 
Harlequin's wand and the machinists of the stage ; he did not 
think they could take place in a system so mighty and so in- 
finitely complicated as that of the political organization of a 
nation. A constitution, too, in his idea, was not a thing, like 
a steam-engine, or a machine for threshing corn, that could 



410 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

be put together and set up in a few weeks or months, and that 
would work equally well wherever it was set up ; he looked 
upon it rather as something that must in every case grow and 
gradually evolve itself out of the soil of the national mind and 
character, that must take its shape in a great measure from the 
prevalent habits and feelings to which it was to be accommo- 
dated, that would not work or stand at all unless it thus formed 
an integral part of the social system to which it belonged. 
The notion of a constitution artificially constructed, and merely 
as it were fastened upon a countrj^ by bolts and screws, was to 
him much the same as the notion of a human body performing 
the functions of life with no other than such a separable ar- 
tificial head stuck upon it. A constitution was with him a 
thing of life. It could no more be set up of a sudden than 
a full-grown tree could be ordered from the manufacturer's and 
so set up. Like a tree, it must have its roots intertwisted 
with the earth on which it stands, even as it has its branches 
extended over it. In the great fields of politics and religion, 
occupied as they are with men's substantial interests, Burke 
regarded inquiries into first principles as worse than vain and 
worthless, as much more likely to mislead and pervert than 
to afford instruction or right guidance ; and it is remarkable 
that this feeling, though deepened and strengthened by the 
experience of his after-life, and, above all, exasperated by 
the events to which his attention was most strongly directed 
in his latest days into an intense dread and horror of the 
confusion and wide-spread ruin that might be wrought by the 
assumption of so incompetent a power as mere human ratio- 
cination to regulate all things according to its own conceit, was 
entertained and expressed by him with great distinctness at 
the outset of his career. It was in this spirit, indeed, that he 
wrote his Vindication of Natural Society, with the design of 
showing how anj^thing whatever might be either attacked or 
defended with great plausibility by the method in which the 
highest and most intricate philosophical questions were discussed 
by Lord Bolingbroke. He " is satisfied," he says in his Preface, 
" that a mind which has no restraint from a sense of its own 
weakness, of its subordinate rank in the creation, and of the 
extreme danger of letting the imagination loose upon some sub- 
jects, may very plausibly attack everything the most excellent 
and venerable; that it would not be difficult to criticise the 
Creation itself; and that, if we were to examine the divine 
fabrics by our ideas of reason and fitness, and to use the same 
method of attack by which some men have assaulted revealed 



BURKE. 411 

religion, we might, with as good colour, and with the same 
success, make the wisdom and power of God in his Creation 
appear to many no better than foolishness." But, on the other 
hand, within the boundary by which he conceived himself to be 
properly limited and restrained, there never was either a more 
ingenious and profound investigator or a bolder reformer than 
Burke. He had, indeed, more in him of the orator and of the 
poet than of the mere reasoner ; but yet, like Bacon, whom 
altogether he greatly resembled in intellectual character, an 
instinctive sagacity and penetration generally led him to see 
where the truth lay, and then his boundless ingenuity supplied 
him readily with all the considerations and arguments which 
the exposition of the matter required, and the fervour of his 
awakened fancy with striking illustration and impassioned elo- 
quence in a measure hardly to be elsewhere found intermingled 
and incorporated with the same profoundness, extent, and 
many-sidedness of view. For in this Burke is distinguished 
from nearly all other orators, and it is a distinction that some- 
what interferes with his mere oratorical power, that he is both 
too reflective and too honest to confine himself to the contempla- 
tion of only one side of any question he takes up : he selects, of 
course, for advocacy and inculcation the particular view which 
he holds to be the sound one, and often it will no doubt be 
thought by those who dissent from him that he does not do 
justice to some of the considerations that stand opposed to his 
own opinion ; but still it is not his habit to overlook such 
adverse considerations ; he shows himself at least perfectly 
aware of their existence, even when he possibly underrates their 
importance. For the immediate effect of his eloquence, as we 
have said, it might have been better if his mind had not been 
so Argus-eyed to all the various conflicting points of every case 
that he discussed — if, instead of thus continually looking before 
and after on all sides of him, and stopping, whenever two or 
more apparently opposite considerations came in his way, to 
balance or reconcile them, he could have surrendered himself to 
the one view with which his hearers were prepared strongly to 
sympathise, and carried them along with him in a whirlwind of 
passionate declamation. But, " born for the universe," and for 
all time, he was not made for such sacrifice of truth, and all 
high, enduring things, to the triumph of an hour. And he has 
not gone without his well-earned reward. If it was objected 
to him in his own day that, "too deep for his hearers," he 
" still went on refining, 
And thought of convincing while they thought of dining, ' 



412 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

that searclimg pliilosopliy whicli j)ervades his speeches and 
writings, and is there wedded in such happy union to glowing 
words and poetic imagery, has rescued them alone from the 
neglect and oblivion that have overtaken all the other oratory 
and political pamphleteering of that day, however more loudl}^ 
lauded at the time, and has secured to them an existence as 
extended as that of the language, and to their eloquence and 
wisdom whatever admiration and whatever influence and au- 
thority they may be entitled to throughout all coming genera- 
tions. The writings of Burke are, indeed, the only English 
political writings of a past age that continue to be read in the 
present. And they are now perhaps more studied, and their 
value, both philosophical and oratorical, better and more highly 
appreciated, than even when they were first produced. They 
were at first probably received, even by those who rated them 
highest and felt their power the most, as little more than mere 
party appeals — which, indeed, to a considerable extent most 
of them were, for their author, from the circumstances of his 
position and of the time, was of necessity involved in the great 
battle of faction which then drew into its maelstrom everj^thing 
littlest and greatest, meanest and loftiest. — and, as was his 
nature, he fought that fight, while that was the work to be done, 
like a man, with his whole heart, and mind, and soul, and 
strength. But it can hardly be said in prosaic verity, as it has 
been said in the liveliness and levity of verse, that he " to 
party gave up what was meant for mankind." He gave up 
nothing to his part}'-, except his best exertions for the time 
being, and for the end immediately in view, while he continued 
to serve under its banner. He separated himself from his 
party, and even from the friends and associates with whom 
he had passed his life, when, whether rightly or wrongly, he 
conceived that a higher duty than that of fidelity to his party- 
banner called upon him to take that course. For that Burke, 
in leaving the ranks of the opposition in the year 1790, or rather 
in declining to go along with the main body of the opposition 
in the view which they took at that particular moment of the 
French Ee volution, acted from the most conscientious motives 
and the strongest convictions, we may assume to be now com- 
pletely admitted by all whose opinions anybody thinks worth 
regarding. The notion that he was bought off by the ministry 
— he who never to the end of his life joined the ministry, or 
ceased to express his entire disapprobation of their conduct of 
the war with France — he, by whom, in fact, they were con- 
trolled and coerced, not he by them — the old cry that he was 



BURKE. 413 

paid to attack fhe French Eevolution, by the pension, forsooth, 
that was bestowed upon him five years after — all this is now 
left to the rabid ignorance of your mere pothonse politician. 
Those who have really read and studied what Burke has 
written know that there was nothing new in the views he 
proclaimed after the breaking out of that mighty convulsion, 
nothing differing from or inconsistent with the principles and 
doctrines on the subject of government he had always held and 
expressed. In truth, he could not have joined in the chorus of 
acclamation with which Fox and many of his friends greeted the 
advent of the French Eevolution without abandoning the poli- 
tical philosophy of his whole previous life. As we have else- 
where observed, "his principles were altogether averse from 
a purely democratic constitution of government from the first. 
He always, indeed, denied that he was a man of aristocratic 
inclinations, meaning by that one who favoured the aristocratic 
more than the popular element in the constitution: but he no 
more for all that ever professed any wish wholly to extinguish 

the former element than the latter The only respect in 

which his latest writings really differ from those of early date 
is, that they evince a more excited sense of the dangers of 
popular delusion and passion, and urge with greater earnestness 
the importance of those restraining institutions which the author 
conceives, and always did conceive, to be necessary for the 
stability of governments and the conservation of society. But 
this is nothing more than the change of topic that is natural 
to a new occasion." * Or, as he has himself finely said, in 
defending his own consistency — " A man, who, among various 
objects of his equal regard, is secure of some, and full of anxiety 
for the fate of others, is apt to go to much greater lengths in 
his preference of the objects of his immediate solicitude than 
]Mr. Burke has ever done. A man so circumstanced often seems 
to undervalue, to vilify, almost to reprobate and disown, those 
that are out of danger. This is the voice of nature and truth, 
and not of inconsistency and false pretence. The danger of 
anything very dear to us removes, for the moment, every other 
affection from the mind. When Priam has his whole thoughts 
emploj^ed on the body of his Hector, he repels with indignation, 
and drives from him with a thousand reproaches, his surviving 
sons, who with an officious piety crowded about him to offer 
their assistance. A good critic would say that this is a master- 
stroke, and marks' a deep understanding of nature in the father 
of poetry. He would despise a Zoilus, who would conclude 
* Art. on Burke, in Penny Cyclopsedia, vi, 35. 



414 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

from this passage that Homer meant to represent this man of 
affliction as hating, or being indiiferent and cold in his affections 
to, the poor relics of his house, or that he preferred a dead 
carcase to his living children." * 

As a specimen of Burke's spoken eloquence we will give 
from his Speech on the case of the Nabob of Arcot, delivered in 
the House of Commons on the 28th of February, 1785, the passage 
containing the description of Hyder All's devastation of the 
Carnatic : — 

When at length Hyder All found that he had to do with men who either 
would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, 
and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he 
decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predesti- 
nated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the 
gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Car- 
natic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desola- 
tion as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds 
the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became 
at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made 
no secret whatsoever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his 
disputes with every enemy, and every rival, who buried their mutual ani- 
mosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of 
Arcot,t he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add 
to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction ; and, compounding all the 
materials of fury, havoc, and desolation, into one black cloud, he hung for 
a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all 
the evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which 
blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole 
of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, 
the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue 
can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were 
mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, 
consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabit- 
ants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered ; others, 
without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of 
function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a 
whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the 
trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown 
and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the 
walled cities. But, escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the 
jaws of famine. 

The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly 
liberal ; and all was done by charity that private charity could do ; but it 



* Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. 

f The designs upon Hyder, which provoked this retaliation on his part, 
are represented in the speech as the scheme of the Nabob's English 
creditors. 



BURKE. 415 

was a people in beggary, a nation which stretched out its hands for food. 
For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and 
luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our 
austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, 
almost without complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of 
Madras ; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on 
the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I 
was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow- 
citizens by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague 
of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, 
this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us 
all feels himself to be nothing more than he is ; but I find myself unable 
to manage it with decorum ; these details are of a species of horror so 
nauseous and disgusting ; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the 
hearers ; they are so humiliating to human nature itself ; that, on better 
thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, 
and to leave it to your general conceptions. 

For eighteen months without intermission, this destruction raged from 
the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore ; and so completely did these 
masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his ferocious son, absolve themselves 
of their impious vow, that, when the British armies traversed, as they did, 
the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole 
line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one 
child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead, 
uniform silence reigned over the whole region. 

It is a mistake to suppose that either imagination or passion 
is apt to become weaker as the other powers of the mind 
strengthen and acquire larger scope. The history of all the 
greatest poetical minds of all times and countries confutes 
this notion. Burke's imagination grew with his intellect, by 
which it was nourished, with his ever-extending realm of 
thought, with his constantly increasing experience of life 
and knowledge of every kind; and his latest writings are 
his most splendid as well as his most profound. Undoubtedly 
the work in which his eloquence is at once the most highly 
finished, and the most impregnated with philosophy and depth, 
of thought, is his Eeflections on the French Kevolution. But 
this work is so generally known, at least in its most striking 
passages, that we may satisfy ourselves with a single short 
extract : — 

You will observe, that, from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Rights, 
it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our 
liberties as an entailed inheritance, derived to us from our forefathers, and 
to be transmitted to our posterity ; as an estate specially belonging to the 
people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more 
general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity 
in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown ; au 



416 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

inheritable peerage ; and a House of Commons and a people inheriting 
privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors. 

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection ; or rather 
the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, 
and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish 
temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who 
never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England 
well know, that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of con- 
servation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all exckiding a 
principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free : but it secures what 
it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on 
these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement : grasped as 
in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after 
the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government 
and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit 
our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of for- 
tune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the 
same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspond- 
ence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of 
existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts ; where- 
in, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great 
mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole at one time is never 
old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable con- 
stancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, reno- 
vation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the 
conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new ; in 
what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner, 
and on these principles, to our forefathers, we are guided, not by the super- 
stition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this 
choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a 
relation in blood ; binding up the constitution of our country with our 
dearest domestic ties ; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of 
our family affections ; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth 
of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, 
our sepulchres, and our altars. 

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial insti- 
tutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to 
fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived 
several other, and those no small, benefits from considering our liberties 
in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence 
of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to mis- 
rule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal 
descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents 
that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those 
who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty 
becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It 
has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns 
armorial. It has its gallery of portraits ; its monumental inscriptions ; its 
records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institu- 
tions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual 



BURKE. 417 

men ; on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they 
are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce any thing hetter 
adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we 
have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, 
our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and 
magazines of our rights and privileges. 

The Eeflections appeared in 1790. We shall not give any 
extract from the Letter to a Noble Lord on the attacks made 
upon him in the House of Lords by the Duke of Bedford and the 
Earl of Lauderdale, which, as it is one of the most eloquent and 
spirited, is also perhaps the most generally known of all Burke's 
writings. The following passage from another Letter, written 
in 1795 (the year before), to William Elliot, Esq., on a speech 
made in the House of Lords by the Duke of Norfolk, will probably 
be less familiar to many of our readers : — 

I wish to warn the people against the greatest of all evils — a blind and 
furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform. I was indeed well 
aware that pov/er rarely reforms itself. So it is undoubtedly when all is 
quiet about it. But I was in hopes that provident fear might prevent 
fruitless penitence. 1 trusted that danger might produce at least circum- 
spection ; I flattered myself, in a moment like this, that nothing would be 
added to make authority top-heavy ; that the very moment of an earth- 
quake would not be the time chosen for adding a story to our houses. I 
hoped to see the surest of all reforms, perhaps the only sure reform, the 
ceasing to do ill. In the meantime, 1 wished to the people the wisdom of 
knowing how to tolerate a condition which none of their efforts can render 
much more than tolerable. It was a condition, however, in which every 
thing was to be found that could enable them to live to nature, and, if so 
they pleased, to live to virtue and to honour. 

I do not repent that I thought better of those to whom I wished well 
than they will suffer me long to think that they deserved. Far from 
repenting, I would to God that new faculties had been called up in me, in 
favour not of this or that man, or this or that system, but of the general 
vital principle, that whilst in its vigour produced the state of things trans- 
mitted to us from our fathers ; but which, through the joint operations of 
the abuses of authority and liberty, may perish in our hands. I am not of 
opinion that the race of men, and the commonwealths they create, like the 
bodies of individuals, grow effete, and languid, and bloodless, and ossify, 
by the necessities of their own conformation and the fatal operation of 
longevity and time. These analogies between bodies natural and politic, 
though they may sometimes illustrate arguments, furnish no argument of 
themselves. They are but too often used, under the colour of a specious 
philosophy, to find apologies for the despair of laziness and pusillanimity, 
and to excuse the want of all manly efforts when the exigencies of our 
country call for them most loudly. 

How often has public calamity been arrested on the very brink of ruin 
by the seasonable energy of a single man ! Have we no such man amongst 
us ? I am as sure as I am of my being that one vigorous mind, without 

2e 



418 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

ofiSce, without situation, witliout public functions of any kind (at a time 
when the want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is), 1 say, one such 
maa, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his own for- 
titude, vigour, enterprise, and perseverance, would first draw to him some 
few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be in exist- 
ence, would appear, and troop about him. 

If I saw this auspicious beginning, baffled and frustrated as I am, yet, on 
the very verge of a timely grave, abandoned abroad and desolate at home, 
stripped of my boast, my hope, my consolation, my helper, my counsellor, 
and my guide (you know in part what I have lost, and would to God 1 
could clear myself of all neglect and fault in that loss), yet thus, even thus, 
I would rake up the fire under all the ashes that oppress it. I am no 
longer patient of the public eye ; nor am I of force to win my way, and to 
justle and elbow in a crowd. But, even in solitude, something may be 
done for society. The meditations of the closet have afl"ected senates with 
a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with the brands of the furies. The 
cure might come from the same source with the distemper. I would add 
my part to those who would animate the people (whose hearts are yet 
right) to new exertions in the old cause. 

Novelty is not the only source of zeal. Why should not a Maccabeus 
and his brethren arise to assert the honour of the ancient laws, and to 
defend the temple of their forefathers, with as ardent a spirit as can inspire 
any innovator to destroy the monuments of the piety and the glory of 
ancient ages ? It is not a hazarded assertion, it is a great truth, that, when 
once things are gone out of their ordinary course, it is by acts out of the 
ordinary course they can alone be re-established. Eepublican spirit can 
only be combated by a spirit of the same nature : of the same nature, but 
informed with another principle, and pointed to another end. I would per- 
suade a resistance both to the corruption and to the reformation that pre- 
vails. It will not be the weaker, but much the stronger, for combating 
both together. A victory over real corruptions would enable us to baffle 
the spurious and pretended reformations. I would not wish to excite, or 
even to tolerate, that kind of evil which invokes the powers of hell to rectify 
the disorders of the earth. No ! I would add my voice, with better, and, 
I trust, more potent charms, to draw down justice, and wisdom, and forti- 
tude from heaven, for the correction of human vice, and the recalling of 
human error from the devious ways into which it has been betrayed. I 
would wish to call the impulses of individuals at once to the aid and to the 
control of authority. By this, which I call the true republican spirit, para- 
doxical as it may appear, monarchies alone can be rescued from the imbe- 
cility of courts and the madness of the crowd. This republican spirit 
would not suffer men in high place to bring ruin on their country and on 
themselves. It would reform, not by destroying, but by saving the gi-eat, 
the rich, and the powerful. Such a republican spirit we, perhaps fondly, 
conceive to have animated the distinguished heroes and patriots of old, who 
knew no mode of policy but religion and virtue. These they would have 
paramount to all constitutions ; they would not suffer monarchs, or senates, 
or popular assemblies, under pretences of dignity, or authority, or freedom, 
to shake off those moral riders which reason has appointed to govern every 
sort of rude power. These, in appearance loading them by their weight, 



BURKE. 419 

do by that pressure augment their essential force. The momentum i^ 
increased by the extraneous weight. It is true in moral, as it is in mecha- 
nical science. It is true, not only in the draught but in the race. Thesa 
riders of the great, in effect, hold the reins which guide them in their 
course, and wear the spur that stimulates them to the goals of honour and 
of safety. The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of 
virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great. 

From the second of the Letters on a Eegicide Peace, or to 
transcribe the full title, Letters addressed to a Member of the 
present Parliament on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide 
Directory of France,* published in 1796, we give as our last 
extract the following remarkable observations on the conduct of 
the war : — 

It is a dreadful truth, but it is a truth that cannot be concealed ; in 
ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our 
superiors. They saw the thing right from the very beginning. Whatever 
were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its 
spirit, and for its objects, it was a civil war ; and as such they pursued it. 
It is a war between the partisans of the ancient, civil, moral, and political 
order of Europe, against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists, which 
means to change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire 
over other nations ; it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning 
with the conquest of France. The leaders of that sect secured the centre 
of Europe ; and, that assured, they knew that, whatever might be the event 
of battles and sieges, their cause was victorious. Whether its territory had 
a little more or a little less peeled from its surface, or whether an island or 
two was detached from its commerce, to them was of little moment. The 
conquest of France was a glorious acquisition. That once well laid as a 
basis of empire, opportunities never could be wanting to regain or to replace 
what had been lost, and dreadfully to avenge themselves on the faction of 
their adversaries. 

They saw it was a civil war. It was their business to persuade their 
adversaries that it ought to be a foreign war. The Jacobins everywhere 
set up a cry against the new crusade ; and they intrigued with effect in the 
cabinet, in the field, and in every private society in Europe. Their task 
was not difficult. The condition of princes, and sometimes of first ministers 
too, is to be pitied. The creatures of the desk, and the creatures of favour, 
had no rehsh for the principles of the manifestoes.^ They promised no 
governments, no regiments, no revenues from whence emoluments might 
arise by perquisite or by grant. In truth, the tribe of vulgar politicians 
are the lowest of our species. There is no trade so vile and mechanical as 



* There are four Letters in all ; of which the two first appeared in 1796 (a 
surreptitious edition being also brought out at the same time by Owen, a 
bookseller of Piccadilly), the third was passing through the press when Bm-ke 
died, in July, 1797, and the fourth, which is unfinished, and had been written, 
so far as it goes, before the three others, after his death. 

1 Of the Emperor and the King of Prussia, published in August, 1792. 



420 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

government in their hands. Virtue is not their habit. They are out of 
themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and 
gloiy. A large, liberal, and prospective view of the interests of states passes 
with them for romance ; and the principles that recommend it for the 
wanderings of a disordered imagination. The calculators compute them 
out of their senses. The jesters and buffoons shame them out of every- 
thing grand and elevated. Littleness in object and in means to them 
appears soundness and sobriety. They think there is nothing worth pur- 
suit but that which they can handle — which they can measure with a two- 
foot rule — which they can tell upon ten fingers. 

Without the principles of the Jacobins, perhaps without any principles 
at all, they played the game of that faction They aimed, or pre- 
tended to aim, at defending themselves against a danger from which there 

can be no security in any defensive plan This error obliged them, 

even in their offensive operations, to adopt a plan of war, against the success 
of which there was something little short of mathematical demonstration. 
They refused to take any step which might strike at the heart of affairs. 
They seemed unwilling to wound the enemy in any vital part. They 
acted through the whole as if they really wished the conservation of the 
Jacobin power, as what might be more favourable than the lawful govern- 
ment to the attainment of the petty objects they looked for. They always 
kept on the circumference ; and, the wider and remoter the circle was, the 
more eagerly they chose it as their sphere of action in this centrifugal war. 
The plan they pursued in its nature demanded great length of time. In its 
execution, they who went the nearest way to work were obliged to cover 
an incredible extent of country. It left to the enemy every means of 
destroying this extended line of weakness. Ill success in any part was 
sure to defeat the effect of the whole. This is true of Austria. It is stiU 
more true of England. On this false plan even good fortune, by further 
weakening the victor, put him but the further off from his object. 

As long as there was any appearance of success, the spirit of aggran- 
dizement, and consequently the spirit of mutual jealousy, seized upon all 
the coalesced powers. Some sought an accession of territory at the expense 
of France, some at the expense of each other, some at the expense of third 
parties ; and, when the vicissitude of disaster took its turn, they found 
common distress a treacherous bond of faith and friendship. 

The greatest skill, conducting the greatest military apparatus, has been 
employed ; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through the 
false policy of the war. The operations of the field suffered by the errors 
of the cabinet. If the same spirit continues when peace is made, the peace 
will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war 

Had we carried on the war on the side of France which looks towards 
the Channel or the Atlantic, we should have attacked our enemy on his 
weak or unarmed side. We should not have to reckon on the loss of a 
man who did not fall in battle. We should have an ally in the heart of 
the country, who, to one hundred thousand, would at one time have added 
eighty thousand men at the least, and all animated by principle, by enthu- 
siasm, and by vengeance ; motives which secured them to the cause in a 
very different manner from some of those allies whom we subsidized with 
milhons. This ally (or rather this principal in the war), by the confession 



METAPHYSICAL AND ETHICAL WRITERS. 421 

of the regicide himself, was more formidable to him than all his other foes 
miited. Warring there, we should have led our arms to the capital of 
wrong. Defeated, we could not fail (proper precautions taken) of a sure 
retreat. Stationary, and only supporting the royalists, an impenetrable 
barrier, an impregnable rampart, would have been formed between the 
enemy and his naval power. We are probably the only nation who have 
declined to act against an enemy, when it might have been done, in his own 
country ; and who, having an armed, a powerful, and a long victorious ally 
in that country, declined all effectual co-operation, and suffered him to 
perish for want of support. On the plan of a war in France, every advan- 
tage that our allies might obtain would be doubtful in its effect. Disasters 
on the one side might have a fair chance of being compensated by victories 
on the other. Had we brought the main of our force to bear upon that 
quarter, all the operations of the British and imperial crowns would have 
been combined. The war would have had system, correspondence, and a 
certain connection. But, as the war has been pursued, the operations of 
the two crowns have not the smallest degree of mutual bearing or relation.^ 



Metaphysical and Ethical Writers. 

The most remarkable metaphysical and speculative works 
which had appeared in England since Locke's Essay were, 
Dr. Samuel Clarke's Sermons on the Evidences of Natural and 
Eevealed Eeligion, 1705, in which he expounded his famous 
a j9nbn argument for the existence of a God; Berkeley's Theory 
of Vision, 1709; his Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710, in 
which he announced his argument against the existence of 
matter; his Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous, 1713; his 
Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 1732; his Analyst, 1734; 
the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, 
Opinions, and Times, first published in the form in which we 
now have them in 1713, after the author's death ; Mandeville's 
Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits, 1714 ; 
Dr. Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Ideas of Beauty and 
Virtue, 1725; Andrew Baxter's Inquiry into the Nature of the 
Human Soul, 1 730 ; Bishop Butler's Sermons preached at the 
Eolls Chapel, 1726 ; and his Analogy of Eeligion, Natural and Ee- 
vealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 1736. David 
Hume, who was born in 1711, and died in 1776, and who has 
gained the highest place in two very^ distinct fields of intellectual 
and literary enterprise, commenced his literary life by the pub- 

^ These prophetic views are very similar to those that were urged twelve 
years later in a memorable article in the Edinburgh Eeview, known to be by 
a great living orator. (See No. XXV., Don CevaUos on the French Usurpa- 
tion of Spain.) 



422 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

lication of his Treatise on Human Nature, in 1739. The work, 
which, as he has himself stated, was projected before he left 
college, and written and published not long after, fell, to use his 
own words, " dead -born from the press;" nor did the specula- 
tions it contained attract much more attention when republished 
ten years after in another form under the title of Philosophical 
Essays concerning Human Understanding ; but they eventually 
proved perhaps more exciting and productive, at least for a time, 
both in this and in other countries, than any other metaphysical 
views that had been promulgated in modern times. Hume's 
Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals appeared in 1752, 
his Natural History of Beligion in 1755 ; and with the latter 
publication he nmy be regarded as having concluded the exposi- 
tion of his sceptical philosophy. Among the most distinguished 
writers on mind and morals that appeared after Hume within 
the first quarter of a century of the reign of George III. may be 
mentioned Hartley, whose Observations on Man, in which he 
unfolded his hypothesis of the association, of ideas, were published 
in 1749 ; Lord Kames (Henry Home), whose Essays on the 
Principles of Morality and Natural Eeligion were published in 
1752; Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments was 
published in 1759 ; Eeid, whose Inquiry into the Human Mind 
on the Principles of Common Sense was published in 1764; 
Abraham Tucker (calling himself Edward Search, Esq.), the 
first part of whose Light of Nature Pursued was published in 
1768, the second in 1778, after the author's death ; and Priestley, 
whose new edition of Hartley's work, with an Introductory 
Dissertation, was published in 1775 ; his Examination of 
Dr. Eeid's Inquiry, the same year ; and his Doctrine of Philo- 
sophical Necessity, in 1777. We may add to the list Campbell's 
very able Dissertation on Miracles, in answer to Hume, which 
appeared in 1763; and Beattie's Essay on Truth, noticed in a 
former page, which appeared in 1770, and was also, as every- 
body knows, an attack upon the philosophy of the great sceptic. 



Historical Writers: — Hume; Eobertson; Gibbon. 

In the latter part of his literary career Hume struck into 
altogether another line, and the subtle and daring metaphysician 
suddenly came before the world in the new character of an his- 
torian. He appears, indeed, to have nearly abandoned meta- 
physics very soon after the publication of his Philosophical 
Essays. In a letter to his friend Sir Gilbert Elliott, which, 



HISTORICAL WRITERS. 423 

though without date, seems from its contents, according to 
Mr. Stewart, to have been written about 1750 or 1751, he says, 
" I am sorry that our correspondence should lead us into these 
abstract speculations. I have thought, and read, and composed 
very little on such questions of late. Morals, politics, and 
literature have employed all my time." The first volume of 
his History of Great Britain, containing the Eeigns of James I. 
and Charles I., was published, in quarto, at Edinburgh, in 1754; 
the second, containing the Commonwealth and the Eeigns of 
Charles II. and James II., at London, in 1757. According to 
his own account the former was received with " one cry of 
reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation;" and after the 
first ebullitions of the fury of his assailants were over, he adds, 
" what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into 
oblivion : Mr. Miller told me that in a twelvemonth he sold only 
forty-five copies of it." He was so bitterly disappointed, that, 
he tells us, had not the war been at that time breaking out 
between. France and England, he had certainly retired to some 
provincial town of the former kingdom, changed his name, and 
never more returned to his native country. However, after a 
little time, in the impracticability of executing this scheme of 
expatriation, he resolved to pick up courage and persevere, the 
more especially as his second volume was considerably advanced. 
That, he informs us, "happened to give less displeasure to the 
AVhigs, and was better received : it not only rose itself, but 
helped to buoy up its unfortunate brother." The work, indeed, 
seems to have now rapidly attained extraordinary popularity. 
Two more volumes, comprehending the reigns of the princes of 
the House of Tudor, appeared in 1759 ; and the remaining two, 
completing the History, from the Invasion of Julius Csesar to 
the accession of Henry VII., in 1762. And several new editions 
of all the volumes were called for in rapid succession. Hume 
makes as much an epoch in our historical as he does in our 
philosophical literature. His originality in the one department 
is as great as in the other; and the influence he has exerted 
upon those who have followed him in the same path has been 
equally extensive and powerful in both cases. His History, 
notwithstanding some defects which the progress of time and of 
knowledge is every year making more considerable, or at least 
enabling us better to perceive, and some others which probably 
would have been much the same at whatever time the work had 
been written, has still merits of so high a kind as a literary 
performance that it must ever retain its place among our few 
classical works in this department, of which it is as yet perhaps 



424 E^TGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

the greatest. In narrative clearness, grace, and spirit, at least, 
it is not excelled, scarcely equalled, by any other completed his- 
torical work in the language ; and it has besides the high charm, 
indispensable to every literary performance that is to endure, of 
being impressed all over with the peculiar character of the 
author's own mind, interesting us even in its most prejudiced 
and objectionable passages (perhaps still more, indeed, in some 
of these than elsewhere) by his tolerant candour and gentleness 
of nature, his charity for all the milder vices, his unaifected 
indifference to many of the common objects of human passion, 
and his contempt for their pursuers, never waxing bitter or 
morose, and often impregnating his style and manner with a vein 
of the quietest but yet truest and richest humour. One effect 
which we may probably ascribe in great part to the example of 
Hume was the attention that immediately began to be turned to 
historic composition in a higher spirit than had heretofore been 
felt among us, and that ere long added to the possessions of the 
language in that department the celebrated performances of 
Eobertson and Gibbon. Robertson's History of Scotland during 
the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James YI. was published 
at London in 1759 ; his History of the Reign of the Emperor 
Charles V., in 1769; and his History of America, in 1776. 
Robertson's style of narration, lucid, equable, and soberly em- 
bellished, took the popular ear and taste from the first. A part 
of the cause of this favourable reception is slily enough indicated 
by Hume, in a letter which he wrote to Robertson himself on 
the publication of the History of Scotland : — " The great success 
of your book, besides its real merit, is forwarded by its prudence, 
and by the deference paid to established opinions. It gains also 
by its being your first performance, and by its surprising the 
public, who are not upon their guard against it. By reason of 
these two circumstances justice is more readily done to its merit, 
which, however, is really so great, that I believe there is scarce 
another instance of a first performance being so near perfection."* 
The applause, indeed, was loud and universal, from Horace 
Walpole to Lord Lyttelton, from Lord Mansfield to David 
Garrick. Nor did it fail to be renewed in equal measure on 
the appearance both of his History of Charles V. and of his His- 
tory of America. But, although in his own day he probably 
bore away the palm from Hume in the estimation of the majority, 
the finest judgments even then discerned, with Gibbon, that 
there was something higher in " the careless inimitable graces " of 
the latter than in his rival's more elaborate regularity, flowing 
* Account of the Life and Writings of Eobertson, by Dugald Stewart. 



ROBERTSON. 425 

and perspicuous as it usually is ; and, as always happens, time 
has brought the general opinion into accordance with this feeling 
of the wiser few. The first volume of Gibbon's History of the 
Decline and Fall of the Eoman Empire appeared in 1776, a few 
months before the death of Hume, and about a year before the 
publication of Eobertson's America ; the second and third fol- 
lowed in 1781 ; the three additional volumes, which completed 
the work, not till 1788. Of the first volume, the author tells us, 
" the first impression was exhausted in a few days ; a second and 
third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand ; and a scarcely 
diminished interest followed the great undertaking to its close, 
notwithstanding the fear which he expresses in the preface to 
his concluding volumes that " six ample quartos must have tried, 
and may have exhausted, the indulgence of ihe public." A 
performance at once of such extent, and of so sustained a bril- 
liancy throughout, perhaps does not exist in ancient or modern 
historical literature ; but it is a hard metallic brilliancy, which 
even the extraordinary interest of the subject and the unflagging 
animation of the writer, with the great skill he shows in the 
disposition of his materials, do not prevent from becoming some- 
times fatiguing and oppressive. Still the splendour, artificial as 
it is, is very imposing ; it does not warm, as well as illuminate, 
like the light of the sun, but it has at least the effect of a 
theatrical blaze of lamps and cressets ; while it is supported 
everywhere by a profusion of real erudition such as would make 
the dullest style and manner interesting. It is remarkable, 
however, that, in regard to mere language, no one of these three 
celebrated historical writers, the most eminent we have yet to 
boast of, at least among those that have stood the test of time, 
can be recommended as a model. No one of the three, in fact, 
was of English birth and education. Gibbon's style is very 
impure, abounding in Gallicisms ; Hume's, especially in the first 
edition of his History, is, with all its natural elegance, almost as 
much infested with Scotticisms ; and, if Robertson's be less 
incorrect in that respect, it is so unidiomatic as to furnish a still 
less adequate exemplification of genuine English eloquence. 
Eobertson died at the age of seventy-one, in 1793; Gibbon, in 
1794, at the age of fifty-seven. 



Political Economy ; Theology; Criticism and Belles Lettres. 

Besides his metaphysical and historical works, upon which his 
fame principally rests, the penetrating and original genius of 
Hume also distinguished itself in another field, that of economical 



426 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

speculation, which had for more than a century before his time 
to some extent engaged the attention of inquirers in this country. 
There are many ingenious views upon this subject scattered up 
and down in his Political Discourses, and his Moral and Political 
Essays. Other contributions, not without value, to the science 
of political economy, for which we are indebted to the middle 
of the last century, are the Rev. R. Wallace's Essay on the 
Numbers of Mankind, published at Edinburgh in 1753 : and 
Sir James Steuart's Inquiry into the Principles of Political 
Economy, which appeared in 1767. But these and all other 
preceding works on the subject have been thrown into the shade 
by Adam Smith's celebrated Inquiry into the Nature and Causes 
of the Wealth of Nations, which, after having been long ex- 
pected, was at last given to the world in the beginning of the 
year 1776. It is interesting to learn that this crowning per- 
formance of his friend was read by Hume, who died before the 
close of the year in which it was published : a letter of his to 
Smith is preserved, in which, after congratulating him warmly 
on having acquitted himself so as to relieve the anxiety and 
fulfil the hopes of his friends, he ends by saying, " If you were 
here at my fireside, I should dispute some of your principles. . . . 
But these, and a hundred other points, are fit only to be dis- 
cussed in conversation. I hope it will be soon, for I am in a 
very bad state of health, and cannot afford a long delay." Smith 
survived till July, 1790. 

A few other names, more or less distinguished in the literature 
of this time, we must content ourselves with merely mention- 
ing : — in theology, Warburton, Lowth, Horsley, Jortin, Madan, 
Gerard, Blair, Geddes, Lardner, Priestley ; in critical and 
grammatical disquisition, Harris, Monboddo, Kames, Blair, 
Jones ; in antiquarian research, Walpole, Hawkins, Bumey, 
Chandler, Barrington, Steevens, Pegge, Farmer, Vallancey, 
Grose, Gough ; in the department of the belles lettres and mis- 
cellaneous speculation, Chesterfield, Hawkesworth, Brown, 
Jenyns, Bryant, Hurd, Melmoth, Potter, Francklin, &c. 



427 



THE LATTEE PAET OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY. 



COWPER. 

The death of Samuel Joliiison, in the end of the year 1784, makes 
a pause, or point of distinction, in our literature, hardly less 
notable than the acknowledgment of the independence of America, 
the year before, makes in our political history. It was not only 
the end of a reign, but the end of kingship altogether, in our 
literary system. For King Samuel has had no successor ; nobody 
since his day, and that of his contemporary Voltaire, who died 
in 1778, at the age of eigbty-five, has sat on a throne of literature 
either in England or in France. 

It is a remarkable fact that, if we were to continue our notices 
of tbe poets of the last century in strict chronological order, the 
first name we should have to mention would be that of a writer, 
who more properly belongs to what may almost be called our 
own day. Crabbe, whose Tales of the Hall, the most striking 
production of bis powerful and original genius, appeared in 
1819, and who died so recently as 1832, published his first 
poem. The Library, in 1781 : some extracts from it are given in 
the Annual Eegister for that year. But Crabbe's literary career 
is divided into two parts by a chasm or interval, during which 
be published nothing, of nearly twenty years; and bis proper 
era is the present century. 

One remark, however, touching this writer may be made 
here : his first manner was evidently caught from Churchill more 
than from any other of his predecessors. And this was also the 
case with his contemporary Cowper, the poetical writer whose 
name casts tbe greatest illustration upon the last twenty years 
of the eighteenth century. William Cowper, born in 1731, 
twenty-three years before Crabbe, — we pass over his anonymous 
contributions to his friend the Eev. Mr. Kewton's collection of 
the Olney Hymns, published in 1776, — gave to the world the 
first volume of his poems, containing those entitled Table-Talk, 
The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, 
Conversation, and Eetirement, in 1782 ; his famous History of 
John Gilpin appeared the following year, without his name, in 



428 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

a publication called The Eepository; his second volume, con- 
taining The Task, Tirocinium, and some shorter pieces, was 
published in 1785; his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey 
in 1791 ; and his death took place on the 25th of April, 1800. 
It is recorded that Cowper's first volume attracted little atten- 
tion : it certainly appears to have excited no perception in the 
mind or eye of the public of that day that a new and great light 
had arisen in the poetical firmament. The Annual Eegister for 
1781, as we have said, gives extracts from Crabbe's Library; a 
long passage from his next poem, The Village, is given in the 
volume for 1783 ; the volume for 1785 in like manner treats its 
readers to a quotation from The Newspaper, which he had pub- 
lished in that year ; but, except that the anonymous History of 
John Gilpin is extracted in the volume for 1783 from the Eepo- 
sitory, we have nothing there of Cowper's till we come to the 
volume for 1786, which contains two of the minor pieces pub- 
lished in his second volume. Crabbe was probably indebted for 
the distinction he received in part to his friend and patron 
Burke, under whose direction the Eegister was compiled; but 
the silence observed in regard to Cowper may be taken as not 
on that account the less conclusive as to the little or next to no 
impression his first volume made. Yet surely there were both 
a force and a freshness of manner in the new aspirant that might 
have been expected to draw some observation. JSFor had there 
of late been such plenty of good poetry produced in England as 
to make anything of the kind a drug in the market. But here, 
in fact, lay the main cause of the public inattention. The ago 
was not poetical. The manufacture of verse was carried on, 
indeed, upon a considerable scale, by the Ilayleys and the 
Whiteheads and the Pratts and others (spinners of sound and 
weavers of words not for a moment to be compared in inventive 
and imaginative faculty, or in faculty of any kind, any more 
than for the utility of their work, with their contemporaries the 
Arkwrights and Cartwrights) ; but the production of poetry had 
gone so much out, that, even in the class most accustomed to 
judge of these things, few people knew it when they saw it. It 
has been said that the severe and theological tone of this poetry 
of Cowper's operated against- its immediate popularity ; and that 
was probably the case too ; but it could only have been so, at 
any rate to the same extent, in a time at the least as indifferent 
to poetry as to religion and morality. For, certainly, since the 
days of Pope, nothing in the same style had been produced 
among us to be compared with these poems of Cowper's for ani- 
mation, vigour, and point, which are among the most admired 



COWPER. 429 

qualities of that great writer, any more than for the cordiality, 
earnestness, and fervour which are more peculiarly their own. 
Smoother versification we had had in great abundance ; more pomp 
and splendour of rhetorical declamation, perhaps, as in Johnson's 
paraphrases from Juvenal ; more warmth and glow of imagina- 
tion, as in Goldsmith's two poems, if they are to be considered 
as coming into the competition. But, on the whole, verse of 
such bone and muscle had proceeded from no recent writer, — 
not excepting Churchill, whose poetry had little else than its 
coarse strength to recommend it, and whose hasty and careless 
workmanship Cowper, while he had to a certain degree been his 
imitator, had learned, with his artistical feeling, infinitely to 
surpass. Churchill's vehement invective, vnth its exaggerations 
and personalities, made him the most popular poet of his day : 
Cowper, neglected at first, has taken his place as one of the 
classics of the language. Each has had his reward — the reward 
he best deserved, and probably most desired. 

As the death of Samuel Johnson closes one era of our literature, 
so the appearance of Cowper as a poet opens another. Notwith- 
standing his obligations both to Churchill and Pope, a main 
characteristic of Cowper's poetry is its originality. Compared 
with almost any one of his predecessors, he was what we may 
call a natural poet. He broke through conventional forms and 
usages in his mode of writing more daringly than any English 
poet before him had done, at least since the genius of Pope had 
bound in its spell the phraseology and rhythm of our poetry. 
His opinions were not more his own than his manner of express- 
ing them. Plis principles of diction and versification were 
announced, in part, in the poem with which he introduced him- 
self to the public, his Table-Talk, in which, having intimated 
his contempt for the " creamj;^ smoothness" of modern fashion- 
able verse, where sentiment was so often 

sacrificed to sound, 
And truth cut short to make a period round, 

he exclaims, 

Give me the line that ploughs its stately course 
Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force ; 
That, like some cottage beauty, strikes the heart, 
Quite unindebted to the tricks of art. 

But, although he despised the " tricks " of art, Cowper, like 
every great poet, was also a great artist ; and, with all its in 
that day almost unexampled simplicity and naturalness, his style 
is the very reverse of a slovenly or irregular one. If his verse 



430 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

be not so higlily polished as that of Pope, — who, he complains, 
has 

Made poetry a mere mechanic art, 

And every warbler has his tune by heart, — 

it is in its own way nearly as " well disciplined, complete, com- 
pact," as he has described Pope's to be. With all his avowed 
admiration of Churchill, he was far from being what he has 
called that writer — 

Too proud for art, and trusting in mere force. 

On the contrary, he has in more than one passage descanted on 
" the pangs of a poetic birth " — on 

the shifts and turns. 
The expedients and inventions multiform, 
To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms, 
Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win ; — 

and the other labours to be undergone by whoever would attain 
to excellence in the work of composition. Kot, however, that, 
with all this elaboration, he was a slow writer. Slowness is the 
consequence of indifference, of a writer not being excited by his 
subject — not having his heart in his work, but going through it 
as a mere task ; let him be thoroughly in earnest, fully possessed 
of his subject and possessed by it, and, though the pains he takes 
to find apt and effective expression for his thoughts may tax his 
whole energies like wrestling with a strong man, he will not 
write slowly. He is in a state of active combustion — consuming 
away, it may be, but never pausing. Gowper is said to have 
composed the six thousand verses, or thereby, contained in his 
first volume, in about three months. 

Not creative imagination, nor deep melody, nor even, in 
general, much of fancy or grace or tenderness, is to be met with 
in the poetry of Cowper ; but yet it is not without both high 
and various excellence. Its main charm, and that which is 
never wanting, is its earnestness. This is a quality which gives 
it a power over many minds not at all alive to the poetical ; but 
it is also the source of some of its strongest attractions for those 
that are. Hence its truth both of landscape-painting, and of the 
description of character and states of mind; hence its skilful 
expression of such emotions and passions as it allows itself to 
deal with; hence the force and fervour of its denunciatory 
eloquence, giving to some passages as fine an inspiration of the 
moral sublime as is perhaps anywhere to be found in didactic 
poetry. Hence, we may say, even the directness, simplicity, 
and manliness of Cowper's diction — all that is best in the form, 



COWPER. 431 

as well as in the spirit, of his verse. It was this quality, or 
temper of mind, in short, that principally made him an original 
poet ; and, if not the founder of a new school, the pioneer of a 
new era, of English poetry. Instead of repeating the unmeaning 
conventionalities and faded affectations of his predecessors, it led 
him to turn to the actual nature within him and around him, 
and there to learn both the truths he should utter and the words 
in which he should utter them. 

After Cowper had found, or been found out by, his proper 
audience, the qualities in his poetry that at first had most 
repelled ordinary readers rather aided its success. In par- 
ticular, as we have said, its theological tone and spirit made it 
acceptable in quarters to which poetry of any kind had rarely 
penetrated, and where it may perhaps be affirmed that it keeps 
its ground chiefly perforce of this its most prosaic peculiarity ; 
although, at the same time, it is probable that the vigorous 
verse to which his system of theology and morals has been 
married by Cowper has not been without effect in diffusing not 
only a more indulgent toleration but a truer feeling and love for 
poetry throughout what is called the religious world. Nor is it 
to be denied that the source of Cowper's own most potent in- 
spiration is his theological creed. The most popular of his 
poems, and also certainly the most elaborate, is his Task ; i-* 
abounds in that delineation of domestic and every-day life whicl 
interests everybody, in descriptions of incidents and natural 
appearances with which all are familiar, in the expression of sen- 
timents and convictions to which most hearts readily respond : 
it is a poem, therefore, in which the greatest number of readers 
find the greatest number of things to attract and attach them. 
Besides, both in the form and in the matter, it has less of what 
is felt to be strange and sometimes repulsive by the generality ; 
the verse flows, for the most part, smoothly enough, if not with 
much variety of music; the diction is, as usual with Cowper, 
clear, manly, and expressive, but at the same time, from being 
looser and more diffuse, seldomer harsh or difficult than it is in 
some of his other compositions ; above all, the doctrinal strain 
is pitched upon a lower key, and, without any essential point 
being given up, both morality and religion certainly assume a 
countenance and voice considerably less rueful and vindictive. 
But, although The Task has much occasional elevation and elo- 
quence, and some sunny passages, it perhaps nowhere rises to the 
passionate force and vehemence to which Cowper had been carried 
by a more burning zeal in some of his earlier poems. Take, for 
instance, the following fine burst in that entitled Table-Talk : — ■ 



432 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Not only vice disposes and prepares 

The mind, that slumbers sweetly in her snares, 

To stoop to tyranny's usurped command, 

And bend her polished neck beneath his hand 

(A dire effect, by one of Nature's laws, 

Unchangeably connected with its cause) ; 

But ProYidence himself will intervene 

To throw his dark displeasure o'er the scene. 

All are his instruments ; each form of war, 

'\Vliat burns at home, or threatens from afar, 

Nature in arms, her elements at strife, 

The storms that overset the joys of life, 

Are but his rods to scourge a guilty land, 

And wast& it at the bidding of his hand. 

He gives the word, and mutiny soon roars 

In all her gates, and shakes her distant shores ; 

The standards of all nations are unfurled ; 

She has one foe, and that one foe the world : 

And, if he doom that people Avith a frown. 

And mark them with a seal of wrath pressed down. 

Obduracy takes place ; callous and tough 

The reprobated race grows judgment-proof ; 

Earth shakes beneath them, and heaven wars above ; 

But nothing scares them fi-om the course they love. 

To the lascivious pipe, and wanton song, 

That charm down fear, they frolic it along, 

With mad rapidity and unconcern, 

Down to the gulf from which is no return. 

They trust in navies, and their navies fail — 

God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail ! 

They trust in armies, and their courage dies ; 

In wisdom, wealth, in fortune, and in lies ; 

But all they trust in withers, as it must, 

When He commands, in whom they place no trust. 

Vengeance at last pours down upon their coast 

A long-despised, but now victorious, host ; 

Tyranny sends the chain, that must abridge 

The noble sweep of all their privilege ; 

Gives liberty the last, the mortal shock ; 

Slips the slave's collar on, and snaps the lock. 

And, even when it expresses itself in quite other forms, and 
witli least of passionate excitement, the fervour which inspires 
these earlier poems occasionally produces something more bril- 
liant or more graceful than is anywhere to be found in The Task. 
How skilfully and forcibly executed, for example, is the following 
moral delineation in that called Truth : — 

The path to bliss abounds with many a snare : 
Learning is one, and wit, however rare. 



COWPER. 433 

The Frenchman first in literary fame — 

(Mention him, if you please. Voltaire ? — The same) 

With spirit, genius, eloquence, supplied, 

Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily, and died. 

The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew 

Bon mots to gall the Christian and the Jew ; 

An infidel in health ; but what when sick ? 

Oh — then a text would touch him at the quick. 

View him at Paris in his last career ; 

Surrounding throngs the demigod revere ; 

Exalted on his pedestal of pride, 

And fumed with frankincense on every side, 

He begs their flattery with his latest breath, 

And, smothered in 't at last, is praised to death. 

Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door. 
Pillow and bobbins all her little store ; 
Content though mean, and cheerful if not gay, 
Shuffling her threads about the livelong day, 
Just earns a scanty pittance, and at night 
Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light ; 
She, for her humble sphere by nature fit, 
Has little understanding, and no wit. 
Receives no praise ; but, though her lot be such, 
(Toilsome and indigent) she renders much ; 
Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true — 
A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew ; 
And in that charter reads with sparkling eyes 
Her title to a treasure in the skies. 

happy peasant ! unhappy bard ! 
His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward ; 
He praised perhaps for ages yet to come. 
She never heard of half a mile from home ; 
He lost in errors his vain heart prefers, 
She safe in the simplicity of hers. 

Still more happily executed, and in a higher style of art, is the 
following version, so elaborately finished, and yet so severely 
simple, of the meeting of the tv^o disciples with their divine Master 
on the road to Emmans, in the piece entitled Conversation : — 

It happened on a solemn eventide, 
Soon after He that was our surety died. 
Two bosom friends, each pensively inchned. 
The scene of all those sorrows left behind, 
Sought their own village, busied as they went 
In musings worthy of the great event : 
They spake of him they loved, of him whose life. 
Though blameless, had incurred perpetual strife, 
Whose deeds had left, in spite of hostile arts, 
A deep memorial graven on their hearts. 



434 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

The recollection, like a vein of ore, 
The farther traced, enriched them still the more ; 
They thought him, and they justly thought him, one 
Sent to do more than he ajDpeared to have done ; 
To exalt a people, and to place them high 
Above all else ; and wondered he should die. 
Ere yet they brought their journey to an end, 
A stranger joined them, courteous as a friend, 
And asked them, with a kind, engaging air, 
What their affliction was, and begged a share. 
Informed, he gathered up the broken thread, 
And, truth and wisdom gracing all he said, 
Explained, illustrated, and searched so well 
The tender theme on which they chose to dwell, 
That, reaching home, The night, they said, is near 
We must not now be parted, — sojourn here. 
The new acquaintance soon became a guest. 
And, made so welcome at their simple feast, 
He blessed the bread, but vanished at the word, 
And left them both exclaiming, 'Twas the Lord ! 
Did not our hearts feel all he deigned to say ? 
Did not they burn within us by the way ? 

For one thing, Cowper's poetry, not organ-toned, or informed 
with any very rich or original music, any more than soaringly 
imaginative or gorgeously decorated, is of a style that requires 
the sustaining aid of rhyme : in blank verse it is apt to overflow 
in pools and shallows. And this is one among other reasons 
why, after all, some of his short poems, which are nearly all in 
rhyme, are perhaps what he has done best. His John Gilpin, 
universally known and universally enjoyed by his countrymen, 
young and old, educated and uneducated, and perhaps the only 
English poem of which this can be said, of course at once suggests 
itself as standing alone in the collection of what he has left us 
for whimsical conception and vigour of comic humour; but 
there is a quieter exercise of the same talent, or at least of a 
kindred sense of the ludicrous and sly power of giving it expres- 
sion, in others of his shorter pieces. For tenderness and pathos, 
again, nothing else that he has written, and not much that is 
elsewhere to be found of the same kind in English poetry, can 
be compared with his Lines on receiving his Mother's Picture : — 

that those lips had language ! Life has passed 
With me but roughly since I heard thee last. 
Those lips are thine — thy own sweet smile I see, 
The same that oft in childhood solaced me ; 
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say, 
" Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away !" 



^ 



COWPER. 435 

The meek intelligence of those clear eyes 
(Blest he the art that can immortalize, 
The art that haffles Time's gigantic claim 
To quench it) here shines on me still the same. 
Faithful remembrancer of one so dear, 

welcome guest, though unexpected here ! 
Who bidd'st me honour with an artless song, 
Affectionate, a mother lost so long. 

1 will obey, not willingly alone, 

But gladly, as the precept were her own : 
And, while that face renews my filial grief, 
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief. 
Shall steep me in Elysian reverie, 
A momentary dream that thou art she. 
-)^. (^y^mother ! when I learned that thou wast dead, 
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed ? 
Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son. 
Wretch even then, life's journey just begun? 
Perhaps thou gav'st me, though unfelt, a kiss ; 
Perhaps a tear, if souls can melt in bliss — 
Ah that maternal smile ! it answers — Yes. 
I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day, 
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away, 
And, turning from my nursery window, drew 
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu ! 
But was it such ? — It was. — Where thou art gone, 
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown : 
May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore. 
The parting word shall pass my lips no more ! 
Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern. 
Oft gave me promise of thy quick return. 
What ardently I wished I long believed. 
And, disappointed still, was still deceived ; 
By expectation every day beguiled, 
Dupe of to-morrow even from a child. 
Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went. 
Till, all my stock of infant sorrow spent, 
I learned at last submission to my lot. 
But, though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot. 

Where once we dwelt our name is heard no morej 
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor ; 
And where the gardener Kobin, day by day. 
Drew me to school along the public way. 
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapped 
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet-capped, 
'Tis now become a history little known 
That once we called the pastoral house our own. 
Short-lived possession ! but the record fair, 
That memory keeps of all thy kindness there. 
Still outlives many a storm, that has effaced 
A thousand other themes less deej)ly traced. 



i36 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, 

That thou might'st know me safe and warmly laid ; 

Thy morning bounties ere I left my home, 

The biscuit, or confectionary plum ; 

The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed 

By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed : 

All this, and, more endearing stiU than all, 

Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall, 

Ne'er roughened by those cataracts and breaks, 

That humour interposed too often makes ; 

All this still legible in memory's page, 

And still to be so to my latest age. 

Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay 

Such honours to thee as my numbers may ; 

Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere, 

Not scorned in heaven, though little noticed here.-^ 

Could Time, his flight reversed, restore the hours, 
When, playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers, 
The violet, the pink, and jessamine, 
I pricked them into paper with a pin, 
(And thou wast happier than myself the while, 
Would'st softly speak, and stroke my head, and smile) 
Could those few pleasant days again appear. 
Might one wish bring them, would 1 wish them here ? 
I would not trust my heart ; — the dear delight 
Seems so to be desired, perhaps I might. — 
But no : — what here we call our life is such, 
So little to be loved, and thou so much. 
That I should ill requite thee to constrain 
Thy unbound spirit into bonds again. 

Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion's coast 
(The storms all weather'd and the ocean crossed), 
Shoots into port at some well-havened isle. 
Where spices breathe, and brighter seasons smile, 
There sits quiescent on the floods, that show 
Her beauteous form reflected clear below. 
While airs impregnated with incense play 
Around her, fanning light her streamers gay ; 
So thou, with sails how swift ! hast reached the shore 
"Where tempests never beat, nor billows roar."^ 
And thy loved consort on the dangerous tide 
Of life long since has anchored by thy side. 
But me, scarce hoping to attain that rest, 
Always from port withheld, always distressed — 
Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tossed, 
Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost ; 
And day by day some current's thwarting force 
Sets me more distant from a prosperous course. 
Yet the thought that thou art safe, and he ! 
That thought is joy, arrive what may to me. 
1 Garth. 






DARWIN. 437 

My boast is not, that I deduce my birth 
From loins enthroned, and rulers of the earth ; 
But higher far my proud pretensions rise — 
The son of parents passed into the skies. 
,' And now farewell. — Time unrevoked has run 

His wonted course ; yet what I wished is done. 
; By contemplation's help, not sought in vain, 

I seem to have lived my childhood o'er again ; 
To have renewed the joys that once were mine, 
Without the sin of violating thine ; 
And, while the wings of fancy still are free, 
And I can view this mimic show of thee, 
Time has but half succeeded in his theft — 
Thyself removed, thy power to soothe me left. 

This is no doubt, as a whole, Cowper's finest poem, at once 
springing from the deepest and purest fount of passion, and 
happy in shaping itself into richer and sweeter music than he 
has reached in any other. It shows what his real originality, 
and the natural spirit of art that was in him, might have done 
under a better training and more favourable circumstances of 
personal situation, or perhaps in another age. Generally, 
indeed, it may be said of Cowper, that the more he was left to 
himself, or trusted to his own taste and feelings, in writing, the 
better he wrote. In so far as regards the form of composition, 
the principal charm of what he has done best is a natural ele- 
gance, which is most perfect in what he has apparently written 
with the least labour, or at any rate with the least thought of 
rules or models. His Letters to his friends, not written for 
publication at all, but thrown off in the carelessness of his hours 
of leisure and relaxation, have given him as high a place among 
the prose classics of his country as he holds among our poets. 
His least successful performances are his translations of the 
Iliad and Odyssey, throughout which he was straining to imitate 
a style not only unlike his own, but, unfortunately, quite as 
unlike that of his original — for these versions of the most natural 
of all poetry, the Homeric, are, strangely enough, attempted in 
the manner of the most artificial of all poets, Milton. 



Darwin. 

Neither, however, did this age of our literature want its ar 
tificial poetry. In fact, the expiration or abolition of that 
manner among us was brought about not more by the example of 
a fresh and natural style given by Cowper, than by the exhibition 
of the opposite style, pushed to its extreme, given by his con- 



438 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

temporary Darwin. Our great poets of this era cannot be 
accused of hurrying into print at an immature age. Dr. Erasmus 
Darwin, bom in 1721, after having risen to distinguished reputa- 
tion as a physician, published the Second Part of his Botanic 
Garden, under the title of The Loves of the Plants, in 1789 : 
and the First Part, entitled The Economy of Vegetation, two 
years after. He died in 1802. The Botanic Garden, hard, 
brilliant, sonorous, may be called a poem cast in metal — a sort 
of Pandemonium palace of rhyme, not unlike that raised long 
ago in another region, — 

where pilasters round 

Were set, and Doric pillars, overlaid 

With golden architrave ; nor did there want 

Cornice, or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven ;_ 

The roof was fretted gold. 

The poem, however, did not rise exactly " like an exhalation." 
" The verse," writes its author's sprightly biographer, Miss Anna 
Seward, " corrected, polished, and modulated with the most 
sedulous attention ; the notes involving such great diversity of 
matter relating to natural history; and the composition going 
forward in the short recesses of professional attendance, lut chiefly 
in his chaise, as he travelled from one place to another ; the Botanic 
Garden could not be the work of one, two, or three years ; it was 
ten from its primal lines to its first publication." If this account 
may be depended on, the Doctor's supplies of inspiration must 
have been vouchsafed to him at the penurious rate of little more 
than a line a day. At least, therefore, it cannot be said of him, as 
it was said of his more fluent predecessor in both gifts of Apollo, 
Sir Eichard Blackmore, that he wrote " to the rumbling of his 
chariot wheels." The verse, nevertheless, does in another way 
smack of the travelling-chaise, and of " the short recesses of 
professional attendance." Nothing is done in passion and 
power ; but all by filing, and scraping, and rubbing, and other 
painstaking. Every line is as elaborately polished and sharpened 
as a lancet ; and the most eifective paragraphs have the air of 
a lot of those bright little instruments arranged in rows, with 
their blades out, for sale. You feel as if so thick an array of 
points and edges demanded careful handling, and that your 
fingers are scarcely safe in coming near them. Darwin's theory 
of poetry evidently was, that it was all a mechanical afiair — only 
a higher kind of pin-making. His own poetry, however, with 
all its defects, is far from being merely mechanical. The 
Botanic Garden is not a poem which any man of ordinary intelli- 
gence could have produced by sheer care and industry, or such 



A 



DARWIN. 489 

faculty of writing as could be acquired by serving an apprentice 
ship to the trade of poetry. Vicious as it is in manner, it is 
even there of an imposing and original character; and a true 
poetic fire lives under all its affectations, and often blazes up 
through them. There is not much, indeed, of pure soul or high 
imagination in Darwin ; he seldom rises above the visible and 
material ; but he has at least a poet's eye for the perception of 
that, and a poet's fancy for its embellishment and exaltation. 
No writer has surpassed him in the luminous representation of 
visible objects in verse ; his descriptions have the distinctness of 
drawings by the pencil, with the advantage of conveying, by 
their harmonious words, many things that no pencil can paint. 
His images, though they are for the most part tricks of language 
rather than transformations or new embodiments of impas- 
sioned thought, have often at least an Ovidian glitter and 
prettiness, or are striking from their mere ingenuity and novelty 
— as, for example, when he addresses the stars as " flowers of 
the sky," or apostrophizes the glowworm as " Star of the earth, 
and diamond of the night." These two instances, indeed, thus 
brought into juxtaposition, may serve to exemplify the principle 
upon which he constructs such decorations : it is, we see, an 
economical principle ; for, in truth, the one of these figures is 
little more than the other reversed, or inverted. Still both are 
happy and effective enough conceits — and one of them is applied 
and carried out so as to make it more than a mere momentary 
light flashing from the verse. The passage is not without a tone 
of grandeur and meditative pathos : — 

Eoll on, ye stars ! exult in youthful prime, 

Mark with bright curves the printless steps of time ; 

Near and more near your beamy cars approach, 

And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach ; — 

Flowers of the Sky ! ye too to age must yield, 

Frail as your silken sisters of the field ! 

Star after star from heaven's high arch shall rush, 

Suns sink on suns, and sj^stems systems crush, 

Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall, 

And death and night and chaos mingle all ! 

— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from -the storm. 

Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form, 

Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame. 

And soars and shines, another and the same. 

There is also a fine moral inspiration, as well as the usual 
rhetorical brilliancy, in the following lines : — 

Hail, adamantine Steel ! magnetic Lord ! 

King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword ! 



440 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

True to the pole, hj tliee the pilot guides 
His steady helm amid the struggling tides. 
Braves with broad sail the imLmeasurable sea, 
Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee ! 



Burns. 

It was in October or Kovember of tlie year 1786 that the 
press of the obscure country town of Kilmarnock gave to the 
world, in an octavo volume, the first edition of the Poems, 
chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, of Eobert Burns. A second 
edition was printed at Edinburgh early in the following year. 
Bums, born on the 25th of January, 1759, had composed most 
of the pieces contained in this publication ii) the two years 
preceding its appearance : his life — an April day of sunshine 
and storm — closed on the 21st of July, 1796; and in his last 
nine or ten years he may have about doubled the original 
quantity of his printed poetry. He was not quite thirty-seven 
and a half years old when he died — about a year and three 
months older than Byron. Burns is the greatest peasant-poet 
that has ever appeared ; but his poetry is so remarkable in 
itself that the circumstances in which it was produced hardly 
add anything to our admiration. It is a poetry of very limited 
compass — not ascending towards any " highest heaven of inven- 
tion," nor even having much variety of modulation, but yet in 
its few notes as true and melodious a voice of passion as was 
ever heard. It is all light and fire. Considering how little 
the dialect in which he wrote had been trained to the purposes 
of literature, what Burns has done with it is miraculous. 
Nothing in Horace, in the way of curious felicity of phrase, 
excels what we find in the compositions of this Ayrshire plough- 
man. The words are almost alwa3^s so apt and full of life, at 
once so natural and expressive, and so graceful and musical in 
their animated simplicity, that, were the matter ever so trivial, 
they would of themselves turn it into poetry. And the same 
native artistic feeling manifests itself in everything else. One 
characteristic that belongs to whatever Burns has written is 
that, of its kind or in its own way, it is a perfect production. 
It is perfect in the same sense in which every production of 
nature is perfect, the humblest weed as well as the proudest 
flower; and in which, indeed, every true thing whatever is 
perfect, viewed in reference to its species and purpose. His 
poetry is, throughout, real emotion melodiously uttered. As 



BURNS. 441 

such, it is as genuine poetry as was ever written or sung. Not, 
however, although its chief and best inspiration is passion rather 
than imagination, that any poetry ever was farther from being 
a mere ^olian warble addressing itself principally to the nerves. 
Burns's head was as strong as his heart ; his natural sagacity, 
logical faculty, and judgment were of the first order ; no man, 
of poetical or prosaic temperament, ever had a more substantial 
intellectual character. And the character of his poetry is like 
that of the mind and the nature out of which it sprung — instinct 
with passion, but not less so with power of thought — full of 
light, as we have said, as well as of fire. More of matter and 
meaning, in short, in any sense in which the terms may be 
understood, will be found in no verses than there is in his. 
Hence the popularity of the poetry of Burns with all classes of 
his countrymen — a popularity more universal, probably, than 
any other writer ever gained, at least so immediately ; for his 
name, we apprehend, had become a household word among all 
classes in every part of Scotland even in his own lifetime. 
Certainly at the present day, that would be a rare Lowland 
Scotchman, or Scotchwoman either, who should be found never 
to have heard of the name and fame of Eobert Burns, or even to 
be altogether ignorant of his works. It has happened, however, 
from this cause, that he is not perhaps, in general, estimated by 
the best of his productions. Nobody, of course, capable of 
appreciating any of the characteristic qu.alities of Burns's poetry 
will ever think of quoting even the best of the few verses he has 
written in English, as evidence of his poetic genius. In these 
he is Samson shorn of his hair, and become as any other man. 
But even such poems as his Cotter's Saturday Night, and his tale 
of Tarn o' Shanter, convey no adequate conception of what is 
brightest and highest in his poetry. The former is a true and 
touching description in a quiet and subdued manner, suitable to 
the subject, but not adapted to bring out much of his illuminat 
ing fancy and fusing power of passion : the other is a rapid, 
animated, and most effective piece of narrative, with some 
vigorous comedy, and also some scene-painting in a broad, dash- 
ing style, but exhibiting hardly more of the peculiar humour 
of Burns than of his pathos. Of a far rarer merit, much richer 
in true poetic light and colour, and of a much more original and 
distinctive inspiration, are many of his poems which are much 
less frequently referred to, at least out of his own country. Take, 
for instance, that entitled To a Mouse, on turning her up in her 
Nest with the Plough, November, 1785 : — 



442 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Wee,^ sleekit,2 cow'rin,^ timorous beastie/ 

what a panic 's in thy breastie !* 
Thou need na^ start awa^ sa hastie, 

Wi' bickerin' brattle U 

1 wad be laith^ to rin^ an' chase thee, 

Wi' murderin' pattle,^** 
I 'm truly sorry man's dominion 
Has broken nature's social union, 
An' justifies that ill opinion 

Which makes thee startle 
At me, thy poor earth-born companion, 

An' fellow mortal. 

I doubt na, whiles," but thou may thieve ; 
What then ? Poor beastie, thou maun ^^ live ! 
A daimen icker ^ in a thrave '^ 

'S a sma' ^^ request : 
I '11 get a blessin' wi' the lave,^^ 

An' never miss 't. 
Thy wee bit housie,^^ too, in ruin ! 
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin' I^^ 
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,^^ 

0' foggage ^'^ green ! 
An' bleak December's winds ensuin', 

Baith snell ^^ and keen ! 

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste, 
An' weary winter comin' fast ; 
An' cozie ^^ here, beneath the blast, 

Thou thought to dwell ; 
Till crash ! the cruel coulter passed 

Out through thy cell. 

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble ^^ 
Has cost thee monie ^^ a weary nibble ! 
Now thou 's 2^ turned out, for a' thy trouble, 

But house or hald,^^ 
To thole ^^ the winter's sleety dribble ; 

An' cranreuch cald.^^ 



1 Little. 2 Sleek. s Cowering 

* Diminutives of " beast," and " breast." ^ Not. 

^ Away. 7 With scudding fury. ^ Would fshould) be loth. 

^ Eua. ^^ With murderous ploughstaff. ^^ Sometimes. 

^2 Must. 13 An occasional ear of corn. 

1^ A double shock. ^^ Is a small. i*' Eemainder. 

'' Triple diminutive of house — untranslatable into English. 
^'^ Its weak walls the winds are strewing. 

1'^ Nothing now to build a new one. ^o Moss. "' Biting. 

22 Snug. 23 Yery small quantity of leaves and stubble. 24 Many. 
25 Thou is (ort). 26 "Without house or hold. -' Endure. 

28 Hoar-frost cold. 



BURNS. 443 

But, Mousie,^ thou art no thy lane ^ 
In proving foresight may be vain : 
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men 

Gang aft a-gley,^ 
An' leave us nought but grief and pain, 

For promised joy. 

Still thou art blest compared wi' me ! 
The present only toucheth thee : 
But och ! ■* I backward cast my ee •'' 

On prospects drear ; 
An' forward, though I canna ^ see, 

I guess an' fear. 

A simple and common incident poetically conceived has nevei 
been rendered into expression more natural, delicately graceful, 
and true. Of course, however, our glossarial interpretations 
can convey but a very insufficient notion of the aptness of the 
poet's language to those to whom the Scottish dialect is not 
familiar. Such a phrase as " bickering brattle," for instance, is 
not to be translated. The epithet " bickering " implies that 
sharp, explosive, fluttering violence, or impetuosity, which 
belongs to any sudden and rapid progressive movement of short 
continuance, and it expresses the noise as well as the speed. It 
is no doubt the same word with the old English " bickering," 
but used in a more extensive sense : a " bicker " means commonly 
a short irregular fight, or skirmish : but Milton has " bickering 
flame," where, although the commentators interpret the epithet 
as equivalent to quivering, we apprehend it includes the idea of 
crackling also. Darwin has borrowed the phrase, as may be seen 
in one of our extracts given above. Nor is it possible to give 
the effect of the diminutives, in which the Scottish language is 
almost as rich as the Italian. While the English, for example, 
has only its manikin^ the Scotch has its mannie, mannikie, bit mannie, 
bit mannikie^ wee bit mannie, wee bit mannikie, little wee bit mannie, little 
wee bit mannikie ; and so with wife, wifie, wifikie, and many other 
terms. Almost every substantive noun has at least one diminu- 
tive form, made by the affix ie, as mousie, housie. We ought to 
notice also, that the established or customary spelling in these 
and other similar instances does not correctly represent the pro- 
nunciation : — the vowel sound is the soft one usually indicated 
by 00 ; as if the words were written moosie, hoosie, coorin, &c. It 
is an advantage that the Scottish dialect possesses, somewhat 
akin to that possessed by the Grreek in the time of Homer, that, 
from having been comparatively but little employed in literary 

^ Diminutive of " mouse." " Not alone. ^ Gro oft awry. 

4 Ah. 5 Eye. 6 Cannot. 



444 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

composition, and only imperfectly reduced under the dominion 
of grammar, many of its words have several forms, which are not 
only convenient for the exigencies of verse, but are used with 
different effects or shades of meaning. In particular, the English 
form is always available when wanted ; and it is the writer's 
natural resource when he would rise from the light or familiar 
style to one of greater elevation , or earnestness. Thus, in the 
above verses, while expressing only half-playful tenderness and 
commiseration. Burns writes " Now thou 's turned out " (pro- 
nounce oof), in his native dialect; but it is in the regular 
English form, " Still thou art blest," that he gives utterance to 
the deeper pathos and solemnity of the concluding verse. 

The proper companion to this short poem is that addressed 
To a Mountain Daisy, on turning one down with the Plough, 
in April, 1786 ; but in that the execution is not so pure 
throughout, and the latter part runs somewhat into common- 
place. The beginning, however, is in the poet's happiest 
manner : — 

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r, 
Thou 's met me in an evil hour ; 
For I maun crush amang the stour ^ 

Thy tender stem ; 
To spare thee now is past my pow^r, 

Thou bonnie ^ gem. 
Alas ! its no * thy neebor ^ sweet, 
The bonnie lark, companion meet ! 
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet ^ 
Wi' spreckled ^ breast, 
When upward springing, blythe, to greet 

The purpling east. 
Cauld blew the bitter-biting north 
Upon thy early, humble, birth ; 
Yet cheerfully thou glinted ^ forth 

Amid the storm, 
Scarce reared above the parent earth 

Thy tender form. 
The flaunting flowers our gardens yield 
High sheltering woods and wa's maun ' shield ; 
But thou beneath the random bield ^° 

0' clod or stane " 
Adorns the histie ^^ stibble-field, 
Unseen, alane. 

1 Thou hast. ^ D^gt (pronounce floor, hoar, stoor, poor). 

3 Lovely. '• Not. ^ Neighbour. e ^^t. ' 7 Speckled 

^ Peeped, or rather glanced (gianced'st). ^ Walls must. 

10 Shelter. " Stone. ^ Dry and rugged. 



BURNS. 445 

There, in thy scanty mantle clad, 
Thy snawy ^ bosom sun-ward spread, 
Thou lifts thy unassuming head 

In humble guise ; 
But now the share uptears thy bed, 

And low thou lies ! 
Such is the fate of artless maid, 
Sweet floweret of the rural shade ! 
By love's simplicity betrayed. 

And guileless trust. 
Till she, like thee, all soiled is laid 

Low i' the dust. 
Such is the fate of simple bard. 
On life's rough ocean luckless-starred ! 
Unskilful he to note the card 

Of prudent lore, 
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, 

And whelm him o'er ! 
Such fate to suffering worth is given, 
Who long with wants and woes has striven, 
By human pride or cunning driven 

To misery's brink, 
Till, wrenched of every stay but heaven, 

He, ruined, sink ! 
Even thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, 
That fate is thine — no distant date ; 
Stern Kuin's ploughshare drives, elate. 

Full on thy bloom, 
Till crashed beneath the furrow's weight 

Shall be thy doom ! 

The most brilliant comic power, again, animates the pieces 
entitled Scotch Drink, Death and Dr. Hornbook, the Holy 
Fair, the Ordination, and others of his more irreverent or 
reckless effusions. As a picture of manners, however, his Hal- 
lowe'en is Burns's greatest performance — with its easy vigour, 
its execution absolutely perfect, its fulness of various and busy 
life, the truth and reality throughout, the humour diffused over 
it like sunshine and ever and anon flashing forth in changeful 
or more dazzling light, the exquisite feeling and rendering both 
of the whole human spirit of the scene, and also of its accessories 
in what we can scarcely call or conceive of as inanimate nature 
while reading such lines as the following : — 

Whiles 2 ow'r ^ a linn "* the burnie ^ plays, 
As through the glen ^ it wimpled ; '' 

^ Snowy. ^ SometLmes. ^ Over. '* Waterfall. 

^ Kivulet. ^ Dale. '' Nimbly meandered. 



446 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Whiles round a rocky scar ^ it strays ; 

Whiles in a wiel ^ it dimpled ; 
Whiles glittered to the nightly rays, 

Wi' bickering, dancing dazzle ; 
Whiles cookit ^ underneath the braes, 

Below the spreading hazel. 

But this poem is too long for quotation, and is besides well 
known to every reader who knows anything of Bums. We will 
rather present our English readers with one or two shorter 
pieces that may serve to illustrate another quality of the man 
and of his poetry — the admirable sagacity and good sense, never 
separated from manliness and a high spirit, that made so large 
a part of his large heart and understanding. All the more 
considerate nature of Burns speaks in the following Epistle to 
a Young Friend, dated May, 1786 : — 

I lang hae ^ thought, my youthfu' friend, 

A something to have sent you. 
Though it should serve nae ^ other end 

Than just a kind memento ; 
But how the subject- theme may gang 

Let time and chance determine ; 
Perhaps it may turn out a sang, 

Perhaps turn out a sermon. 

Ye '11 try the world soon, my lad. 

And, Andrew dear, believe me, 
Ye '11 find mankind an unco squad,® 

And muckle '' they may grieve ye : 
For care and trouble set your thought, 

Ev'n when your end 's attained ; 
And a' ^ your views may come to nought, 

Where every nerve is strained. 

I '11 no ^ say men are villains a' ; 

The real, hardened wicked, 
Wha hae nae ^° check but human law, 

Are to a few restricked ; " 
But oh ! mankind are unco ^^ weak, 

An' httle to be trusted ; 
If self the wavering balance shake, 

It 's rarely right adjusted ! 

Yet they wha fa' ^^ in fortune's strife. 
Their fate we should na ^^ censm-e ; 

1 Cliff. ^ Small whirlpool. 

3 JSlily disappeared by dipping down, skulked. [Dr. Currie inteiprets it. 
" appeared and disappeared by fits."] ^ Long have. '" No. 

6 Strange crew. ? Much. « All. ^ Not. lo Who have no 

" Restricted. ^^ ygry, strangely. ^^ y^]^^ f.^n u ^^^,l^ 



BURNS. 447 

For still the important end of life 

They equally may answer : 
A man may hae an honest heart, 

Though poortith ^ hourly stare him ; 
A man may tak ^ a neebor's ^ part, 

Yet hae nae cash to spare him. 

Aye free aff han' ^ your story tell, 

When wi' a bosom crony ; ^ 
But still keep something to yoursel ^ 

You scarcely tell to ony7 
Conceal yoursel as weel's^ ye can 

Frae ^ critical dissection ; 
But keek ^° through every other man 

Wi' sharpened, slee " inspection. 

The sacred lowe ^^ o' weel-placed love, 

Luxuriantly indulge it ; 
But never tempt the illicit rove. 

Though naething should divulge it : 
I wave the quantum o' the sin, 

The hazard of concealing ; 
But oh ! it hardens a' within, 

And petrifies the feeling ! 

To catch dame Fortune's golden smile, 

Assiduous wait upon her ; 
And gather gear by every wile 

That 's justified by honour ; 
Not for to hide it in a hedge, 

Not for a train attendant ; 
Bub for the glorious privilege 

Of being independent. 

The fear o' hell 's a hangman's whip 

To haud ^^ the wretch in order ; 
But where ye feel your Jwnour grip, 

Let that aye be your border ; 
Its slightest touches — instant pause ; 

Debar a' side pretences ; 
And resolutely keep its laws, 

Uncaring consequences. 

The great Creator to revere 

Must sure become the creature ; 
But still the preaching cant forbear, 

And even the rigid feature : 

1 Poverty. 2 Take, ^ Neighbour's. 

♦ Offhand. ^ Intimate associate. ^ Yourself. '' Any. 

s As well as. ^ From. i" Look slily. ^^ Sly. 

12 Flame. i3 Hold. 



448 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Yet ne'er with wits profane to range 

Be complaisance extended; 
An Atheist's laugh 's a poor exchange 

For Deity offended. 
When ranting round in pleasure 's ring 

Eeligion may be blinded ; 
Or, if she gie ^ a random sting, 

It may be little minded ; 
But when on life we 're tempest-driven — 

A conscience but a canker — 
A correspondence fixed wi' heaven 

Is sure a noble anchor. 
Adieu, dear, amiable youth ! 

Your heart can ne'er be wanting ; 
May prudence, fortitude, and truth, 

Erect your brow undaunting ! 
In ploughman phrase, " God send you speed," 

Still daily to grow wiser ; 
And may you better reck the rede ^ 

Than ever did the adviser. 

This poem, it will be observed, is for the greater part in 
English ; and it is not throughout written with all the purity of 
diction which Burns never violates in his native dialect. For 
instance, in the fourth stanza the word " censure " is used 
to suit the exigencies of the rhyme, where the sense demands 
some such term as deplore or regret; for, although we might 
censure the man himself who fails to succeed in life (which, 
however, is not the idea here), we do not censure, that is blame 
or condemn, his fate ; we can only lament it ; if we censure 
anything, it is his conduct. In the same stanza, the expression 
" stare him " is, we apprehend, neither English nor {Scotch : 
usage authorizes us to speak of poverty staring a man in the 
face, but not of it staring him, absolutely. Again, in the tenth 
stanza, we have " Eeligion may be blinded," apparently, for may 
be blinked, disregarded, or looked at as with shut eyes.* We 
notice these things, to prevent an impression being left with 
the English reader that they are characteristic of Burns. Ko 
such vices of style, we repeat, are to be found in his Scotch, 
where the diction is uniformly as natural and correct as it is 
appropriate and expressive. 

In a far more elevated and impassioned strain is the poem 

1 Give. 

2 " Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads. 

And reeks not his own read." — Shakespeare, Hamlet. 
* Unless, indeed, we may interpret the word as meaning deprived of the 
power of seeing. 



BURNS. 449 

entitled The Vision. It is too long to be quoted entire ; hut the 
following extracts will be sufficiently intelligible : — 

The sun had closed the winter day, 
The curlers quat ^ their roaring play, 
An' hungered mawkin ^ ta'en her way 

To kail-yards ^ green, 
While faithless snaws "* ilk ^ step betray 

Whare ^ she has been. 

The thresher's weary flingin' tree ^ 

The lee-lang^ day had tired me ; 

And, whan ^ the day had closed his e'e ^^ 

Far i' the west, 
Ben 1' the spence," right pensivelie, 

I gaed ^2 to rest. 

There, lanely,^^ by the ingle-cheek,^* 
I sat and eyed the spewing reek,^^ 
That filled wi' hoast-provoking smeek ^^ 

The auld clay biggin' ;^^ 
An' heard the restless rattons '^ squeak 

About the riggin'.^^ 

All in this mottie,^*' misty clime, 
I backward mused on wasted time, 
How I had spent my youthfa' prime, 

An' done nae thing 
But stringin' blethers ^^ up in rhyme, 

For fools to sing. 
Had I to guid advice but harkit,^^ 
I might, by this,^^ hae led a market, 
Or strutted in a bank an' clarkit 2"* 

My cash account : 
"While here, half -mad, half-fed, half-sarkit,^* 

Is a' the amount. 
I started, muttering Blockhead! Coof!^^ 
And heaved on high my waukit loof,^^ 
To swear by a' yon starry roof, 

Or some rash aith,^^ 
That I henceforth would be rhyme-proof 

Till my last breath — 



I Quitted. 2 The hare. 3 Colewort gardens. 

* Snows. 5 Every. 6 Where [pronounce wliar] 

' Flail. 8 Live-long. 5 When. 1° Eye. 

II Within in the sitting apartment. ^" Went. '^ Lonely. 

11 Fireside. i^ Smoke issuing out. i^ Cough-provoking smoke. 

17 The old clay building, or house. i^ Eats. i^ The roof of the house. 
20 Full of motes. 21 Nonsense, idle words. 22 Hearkened. 

•23 By this time. 24 Written. 25 Half-shirted. 

2" Fool. 27 My palm thickened %ith laliourV 2s Qath. 

2 G 



450 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

When click ! the string the snick ^ did draw ; 
And jee ! the door gaed to the wa' ; 
An' by my ingle-lowe I saw, 

Now bleezin' ^ bright, 
A tight, outlandish hizzie,^ braw, 

Come full in sight. 

Ye need na doubt I held my whisht ;* 
The infant aith, half-formed, was crushed ; 
I glowr'd as eerie 's I 'd been dushed * 

In some wild glen ; 
When sweet, hke modest worth, she blushed 

And steppit ben.® 

Green, slender, leaf-clad holly boughs 
Were t^visted, gracefu', round her brows ; 
I took her for some Scottish Muse 

By that same token ; 
An' come to stop those reckless vows 

Would soon been ^ broken. 
A hair-brained, sentimental trace 
Was strongly marked in her face ; 
A wildly witty, rustic grace 

Shone full upon her ; 
Her eye, even turned on empty space, 

Beamed keen with honour. 

With musing, deep, astonished stare, 
I viewed the heavenly-seeming fair ; 
A whispering throb did witness bear 

Of kindred sweet : 
When, with an elder sister's air, 

She did me greet : — 
" All hail ! my own inspired bard ! 
In me thy native Muse regard ! 
Nor longer mourn thy fate is hard. 

Thus poorly low ! 
I come to give thee such reward 

As we bestow. 
" Know the great Genius of this land 
Has many a light aerial band. 
Who, all beneath his high command, 

Harmoniously, 
As arts or arms they understand. 

Their labours ply. 



^ Latch. ^ Blazing. ^ Hussy. "* Silence. 

^ I stared as frightened as if I had been attacked by a butting ram. 
^ Walked into the room. 7 Which would soon have been. 



BURNS. 451 



" Of these am I — Coila my name ; 
And this district as mine I claim, 
Where once the Campbells, chiefs of fame, 

Held ruling power : — 
I marked thy embryo tuneful flame 

Thy natal hour. 

" With future hope I oft would gaze 
Fond on thy little early ways, 
Thy rudely carolled chiming phrase 

In uncouth rhymes. 
Fired at the simple, artless lays 

Of other times. 

" I saw thee seek the sounding shore, 
Delighted with the dashing roar ; 
Or, when the North his fleecy store 

Drove through the sky, 
I saw grim nature's visage hoar 

Struck thy young eye. 

" Or, when the deep-green-mantled earth 
Warm cherished every floweret's birth. 
And joy and music pouring forth 

In every grove, 
I saw thee eye the general mirth 

With boundless love. 

'* When ripened fields and azure skies 
Called forth the reapers' rustling noise 
I saw thee leave their evening joys. 

And lonely stalk 
To vent thy bosom's swelling rise 

In pensive walk. 

'* When youthful love, warm-blushing, strong, 
Keen-shivering shot thy nerves along, 
Those accents, grateful to thy tongue. 

The adored name, 
I taught thee how to pour in song. 

To soothe thy flame. 

" I saw thy pulse's maddening play 
Wild send thee pleasure's devious way. 
Misled by fancy's meteor ray. 

By passion driven ; 
But yet the light that led astray 

Was lio;ht from heaven. 



" To give my counsels all in one. 
Thy tuneful flame still careful fan ; 



452 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Preserve the dignity of man 

With soul erect ; 
And trust the universal plan 

Will all protect. 

*'And wear thou this" — she solemn said, 
And bound the holly round my head : 
The polished leaves and berries red 

Did rustling play; 
And, like a passing thought, she fled 

In light away. 

These extracts, as extracts in every case must be, are only in- 
dications or hints of what is to be found in the body of poetry 
from which they are taken ; and in this instance, from various 
causes, the impression so conveyed may probably be more than 
usually inadequate — for the strangeness of the dialect must veil 
much of the effect to an English reader, even when the general 
sense is apprehended ; and, besides, their length, their peculiarly 
Scottish spirit and character, and other considerations have 
prevented us from quoting the most successful of Burns's pieces 
in some of the styles in which he most excelled. But still what 
we have transcribed may serve to give a more extended and a 
truer notion of what his poetry realty is than is commonly enter- 
tained by strangers, among whom he is mostly known and judged 
of from two or three of his compositions, which perhaps of all 
that he has produced are the least marked by the peculiar cha- 
racter of his genius. Even out of his own country, his Songs, 
to be sure, have taken all hearts — and they are the very flame- 
breath of his own. No truer poetry exists in any language, or 
in any form. But it is the poetry of the heart much more than 
of either the head or the imagination. Burns's songs do not at 
all resemble the exquisite lyrical snatches with which Shake- 
speare, and also Beaumont and Fletcher, have sprinkled some of 
their dramas — enlivening the busy scene and progress of the 
action as the progress of the wayfarer is enlivened by the voices 
of birds in the hedgerows, or the sight and scent of wild- flowers 
that have sprung up by the road-side. They are never in any 
respect exercises of ingenuity, but alwaj^s utterances of passion, 
and simple and direct as a shout of laughter or a gush of tears. 
Whatever they have of fancy, whatever they have of melody, is 
born of real emotion — is merely the natural expression of the 
poet's feeling at the moment, seeking and finding vent in musical 
words. Since " burning Sappho " loved and sung in the old 
isles of Greece, not much poetry has been produced so thrillingly 
tender as some of the best of these songs. Here, for example, is 



BURNS. 453 

one, rude enough perhaps in language and versification, — but 
every line, every cadence is steeped in pathos : — 

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around 

The castle o' Montgomery, 
Green be your woods, and fair yom- flowers, 

Your waters never drumlie ! ^ 
There summer first unfauld her robes, 

And there the langest tarry ! 
For there I took the last farewell 

0' my sweet Highland Mary. 

How sweetly bloomed the gay green birk,^ 

How rich the hawthorn's blossom, 
As underneath their fragrant shade 

I clasp'd her to my bosom ! 
The golden hours on angel wings 

Flew o'er me and my dearie ; 
For dear to me as light and life 

Was my sweet Highland Mary. 

Wi' mony a vow and locked embrace 

Our parting was fu' tender ; 
And, pledging aft to meet again, 

We tore oursels asunder ; 
But oh ! fell death's untimely frost, 

That nipt my flower sae early ! 
Now green 's the sod, and cauld 's the clay. 

That wraps my Highland Mary ! 

pale, pale now those rosy lips 

I aft hae kissed sae fondly ! 
And closed for aye the sparkling glance 

That dwelt on me sae kindly ! 
And mouldering now in silent dust 

That heart that lo'ed ^ me dearly ! 
But still within my bosom's core 

Shall live my Highland Mary. 

These compositions are so universally known, that it is need 
less to give any others at full length ; but we may throw to- 
gether a few verses and half-verses gathered from several of 
them : — 

When o'er the hill the eastern star 

Tells bughtin' "* time is near, my joe ; 
And owsen ^ frae the furrowed field 
Eeturn sae dowf ^ and weary, ; 



^ Turbid with mud. 2 Birch. ^ Loved. 

•* Folding. 5 Oxen. '^ Dull, spiritless. 



451 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Down by the burn, where scented birks 
Wi' dew are hanging clear, my joe, 

I'll meet thee on the lea-rig,^ 
My ain ^ kind dearie, 0. 

In mirkest ^ glen, at midnight hour, 

I 'd. rove, and ne'er be eerie,* 0, 
If through that glen I gaed ^ to thee, 

My ain kind dearie, 0. 
Although the night were ne'er sae wild, 

And 1 were ne'er sae weary, 0, 
I'd meet thee on the lea-rig, 

My ain kind dearie, 0. 



I hae sworn by the heavens to my Mary, 

I hae sworn by the heavens to be true ; 
And sae may the heavens forget me, 

When I forget my vow ! 
plight me your faith, my Mary, 

And plight me your lily-white hand ; 
pHght me your faith, my Mary, 

Before I leave Scotia's strand. 
We hae plighted our troth, my Mary, 

In mutual affection to join ; 
And cursed be the cause that shall part us ! 

The hour, and the moment o' time ! 



poortith ® cauld, and restless love. 

Ye wreck my peace between ye ; 
Yet poortith a' I could forgive, 

An' 'twere na for my Jeanie. 

why should fate sic ^ pleasure have 
Life's dearest bands untwining ' 

Or why sae sweet a flower as love 
Depend on fortune's shining '? 



To thy bosom lay my heart, 

There to throb and languish ; 
Though despair had wrung its core. 

That w^ould heal its anguish. 

Grassy ridge, ^ Own. ^ Darkest. 

Frightened by dread of spirits. ^ Went. ^ Poverty. ^ Such. 



BURNS. 455 



Take away tliose rosy lips, 
Kich with balmy treasure : 

Turn aw^ay thine eyes of love, 
Lest I die with pleasure. 



Here 's a health to ane I lo'e dear, 

Here 's a health to ane I lo'e dear ; 
Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, 

And soft as their parting tear, Jessy I 

Although thou maun ^ never be mine, 

Although even hope is denied, 
'Tis sweeter for thee despairing 

Than aught in the world beside, Jessy ! 



Ae 2 fond kiss, and then we sever ; 
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever ! - 

^ad we never loved sae kindly. 
Had we never loved sae blindly. 
Never met, or never parted, 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted. 
Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest ! 
Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest ! \ 

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever ; 
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever ! 



In all, indeed, that he has written best, Burns may be said to 
have given us himself, — the passion or sentiment which swayed 
or possessed him at the moment, — almost as much as in his 
songs. In him the poet was the same as the man. He could 
describe with admirable fidelity and force incidents, scenes, 
manners, characters, or whatever else, which had fallen within 
his experience or observation ; but he had little proper dramatic 
imagination, or power of going out of himself into other natures, 
and, as it were, losing his personality in the creations of his 
fancy. His blood was too hot, his pulse beat too tumultuously, 
for that ; at least he was during his short life too much the sport 
both of his own passions aud of many other stormy influences to 
acquire such power of intellectual self-command and self-sup- 
pression. What he might have attained to if a longer earthly 
1 Must. 2 One. 



456 



ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 



existence liad been granted to him — or a less tempestuous one — 
wlio shall say ? Both when his genius first blazed out upon the 
world, and when its light was quenched by death, it seemed as 
if he had been born or designed to do much more than he had 
done. Having written what he wrote before his twenty-seventh 
year, he had doubtless much more additional poetry in him than 
he gave forth between that date and his death at the age of 
thirty-seven — poetry which might now have been the world's 
for ever if that age had been worthy of such a gift of heaven as 
its glorious poet. 



457 



THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 

It miglit almost seem as if there were something in the im- 
pressiveness of the great chronological event formed by the ter- 
mination of one century and the commencement of another that 
had been wont to act with an awakening and fructifying power 
upon literary genius in these islands. Of the three last great 
sunbursts of our literature, the first, making what has been 
called the Elizabethan age of our dramatic and other poetry, 
threw its splendour over the last quarter of the sixteenth and 
the first of the seventeenth century ; the second, famous as the 
Augustan age of Anne, brightened the earlier years of the 
eighteenth ; the nineteenth century was ushered in by the 
third. At the termination of the reign of George III., in 
the year 1820, there were still among us, not to mention minor 
names, at least nine or ten poetical writers, each (whatever 
discordance of opinion there might be about either their relative 
or their absolute merits) commanding universal attention from 
the reading world to whatever he produced : — Crabbe (to take 
them in the order of their seniority), Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
Sou they, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and perhaps we 
ought to add Keats, though more for the shining promise of his 
great but immature genius than for what he had actually done. 
Many other voices there were from which divine words were 
often heard, but these were oracles to whom all listened, whose 
inspiration all men acknowledged. It is such crowding and 
clustering of remarkable writers that has chiefly distinguished 
the great literary ages in every country: there are eminent 
writers at other times, but they come singly or in small numbers, 
as Lucretius, the noblest of the Latin poets, did before the Au- 
gustan age of Eoman literature ; as our own Milton and Dryden 
did in the interval between our Elizabethan age and that of 
Anne ; as Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and then Cowper, 
and Burns, in twos and threes, or one by one, preceded and as it 
were led in the rush and crnsh of our last revival. For such 
single swallows, though they do not make, do yet commonly 
herald the summer ; and accordingly those remarkable writers 
who have thus appeared between one great age of literature 
and another have mostly, it may be observed, arisen not in the 
earlier but in the later portion of the interval — have been not the 



458 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

lagging successors of tlie last era, but the precursors of the next. 
However the fact is to be explained or accounted for, it does 
indeed look as if Nature in this, as in other things, had her times 
of production and of comparative rest and inactivity — her autumns 
and her winters — or, as we may otherwise conceive it, her alter- 
nations of light and darkness, of day and night. After a busy 
and brilliant period of usually some thirty or forty years, there 
has alwaj^s followed in every country a long term during which 
the literary spirit, as if overworked and exhausted, has mani- 
fested little real energy or power of life, and even the very 
demand and taste for the highest kind of literature, for depth, 
and subtlety, and truth, and originality, and passion, and beauty, 
has in a great measure ceased with the supply — a sober and 
slumbrous twilight of imitation and mediocrity, and little more 
than mechanical dexterity in bookmaking, at least with the gene- 
rality of the most popular and applauded writers. 

After all, the reawakening of our English literature, on each of 
the three occasions we have mentioned, was probably brought 
about mainly by the general political and social circumstances of 
the country and of the world at the time. The poetical and dra- 
matic wealth and magnificence of the era of Elizabeth, and James 
came, no doubt, for the most part, out of the passions that had 
been stirred and the strength that had been acquired in the 
mighty contests and convulsions which filled, here and through- 
out Europe, the middle of the sixteenth century ; another break- 
ing up of old institutions and re-edification of the state upon a 
new foundation and a new principle, the work of the last sixty 
years of the seventeenth century, if it did not contribute much 
to train the wits and fine writers of the age of Anne, at least 
both prepared the tranquillity necessary for the restoration of 
elegant literature, and disposed the public mind for its enjoy- 
ment ; the poetical dayspring, finally, that came with our own 
century was born with, and probably in some degree out of, a 
third revolution, which shook both established institutions and 
the minds and opinions of men throughout Europe as much 
almost as the Eeformation itself had done three centuries and a 
half before. It is also to be observed that on each of these three 
occasions the excitement appears to have come to us in part from 
a foreign literature which had undergone a similar reawakening, 
or put forth a new life and vigour, shortly before our own : in 
the Elizabethan age the contagion or impulse was caught from 
the literature of Italy ; in the age of Anne from that of France ; 
in the present period from that of Germany. 



459 

THE LAST AGE OF THE GEOKGES. 
Wordsworth. 

This German inspiration operated most directly, and produced 
the most marked effect, in the poetry of Wordsworth. Words- 
worth, who was born in 1770, has preserved in the editions of 
his collected works some of his verses written so long ago as 
. 1786 ; and he also continued to the last to reprint the two 
earliest of his published poems, entitled An Evening Walk, 
addressed to a Young Lady, from the Lakes of the Korth of 
England, and Descriptive Sketches, taken during a pedestrian 
tour among the Alps, both of which first appeared in 1793. The 
recollection of the former of these poems probably suggested to 
somebody, a few years later, the otherwise not very intelligible 
designation of the Lake School, which has been applied to this 
vrriter and his imitators, or supposed imitators. But the Even- 
ing Walk and the Descriptive Sketches, which are both written 
in the usual rhymiug ten-syllabled verse, are perfectly orthodox 
poems, according to the common creed, in spirit, manner, and 
form. The peculiarities which are conceived to constitute what is 
called the Lake manner first appeared in the Lyrical Ballads ; the 
first volume of which was published in 1798, the second in 1800. 

In the Preface to the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads, the 
author himself described his object as being to ascertain how far 
the purposes of poetry might be fulfilled "by fitting to metrical 
arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of 
vivid sensation." It might, perhaps, be possible to defend this 
notion by the aid of certain assumptions as to what is implied in, 
or to be understood by, a state of vivid sensation, which it may 
be contended is only another phrase for a state of poetical excite- 
ment : undoubtedly the language of a mind in such a state, se- 
lected, or corrected, and made metrical, will be poetry. It is 
almost a truism to say so. Nay, we might go farther, and assert 
that, in the circumstances supposed, the selection and the adapta- 
tion to metrical arrangement would not be necessary ; the lan- 
guage would flow naturally into something of a musical shape 
(that being one of the conditions of poetical expression), and, 
although it might be improved by correction, it would have all 
the essentials of poetry as it was originally produced. But what 
is evidently meant is, that the real or natural language of any 
and every mind when simply in a state of excitement or passion 
is necessarily poetical. The respect in which the doctrine differs 
from that commonly held is, that it assumes mere passion or vivid 
sensation to be in all men and in all cases substantially identical 



460 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

with poetical excitement, and the language in which passion 
expresses itself to be consequently always poetry, at least after it 
has undergone some purification or pruning, and been reduced to 
metrical regularity. As for this qualification, we may remark 
that it must be understood to mean nothing more than that the 
language of passion is improved with reference to poetical effect 
by being thus trained and regulated: otherwise the statement 
would be contradictory and would refute itself; for, if passion, 
or vivid sensation, always speaks in poetry, the metrical arrange- 
ment and the selection are unnecessary and unwarrantable ; if 
these operations be indispensable, the language of vivid sensation 
is not always poetry. But surely it is evident from the nature of 
the thing that it is altogether a misconception of what poetry is 
to conceive it to be nothing more than the language naturally 
prompted by passion or strong emotion. If that were all, all 
men, all women, and all children would be poets. Poetry, in 
the first place, is an art, just as painting is an art ; and the one 
is no more to be practised solely under the guidance of strong 
emotion than the other. Secondly, poetical emotion is something 
as distinct from mere ordinary passion or excitement as is musical 
emotion, or the feeling of the picturesque or the beautiful or the 
grand in painting or in architecture ; the one may and often does 
exist where there exists nothing of the other. Nobody has ever 
thought of defining music to be merely the natural vocal utter- 
ance of men in a state of vivid sensation, or painting to be nothing 
more than their natural way of expressing themselves when in 
such a state by lines and colours : no more is poetry simply their 
real language, or expression by words, when in such a state. It 
makes no difference that words are a mode of expression of which 
men have much more generally the use than they have the use of 
either colours or musical sounds ; if all men could sing or could 
handle the brush, they still would not all be musicians and 
painters whenever they were in a passion. 

It is true that even in the rudest minds emotion will tend to 
make the expression more vivid and forcible ; but it will not for 
all that necessarily rise to poetry. Emotion or excitement alone 
will not produce that idealization in which poetry consists. To 
have that effect the excitement must be of a peculiar character, 
and the mind in which it takes place must "be peculiarly gifted. 
The mistake has probably arisen from a confusion of two things 
which are widely different — the real language of men in a state 
of excitement, and the imaginative imitation of such language 
in the artistic delineation of the excitement. The latter alone 
will necessarily or universally be poetical ; the former may be 



WORDSWOETH. 461 

the veriest of prose. It may be said, indeed, that it is not men's 
real language, but the imitation of it, which is meant to be 
called poetry by Wordsworth and his followers — that, of course, 
their own poetry, even when most conformable to their own 
theor}^ can only consist of what they conceive would be the real 
language of persons placed in the circumstances of those from 
whom it professes to proceed. But this explanation, besides that 
it leaves the theory we are examining, considered as an account 
or definition of poetry, as narrow and defective as ever, still 
assumes that poetical imitation is nothing more than transcrip- 
tion, or its equivalent — such invention as comes as near as 
possible to what literal transcription would be ; which is the 
very misapprehension against which we are arguing. It is 
equally false, we contend, to say that poetry is nothing more 
than either the real language of men in a state of excitement, or 
the mere imitation, the closer the better, of that real language. 
The imitation must be an idealized imitation — an intermingling 
of the poet with his subject by which it receives a new charac- 
ter ; just as, in painting, a great portrait, or other picture from 
nature, is never a fac-simile copy, but always as much a reflec- 
tion from the artist's own spirit as from the scene or object it 
represents. The realm of nature and the realm of art, although 
counterparts, are nevertheless altogether distinct the one from 
the other ; and both painting and poetry belong to the latter, 
not to the former. 

We cannot say that Wordsworth's theory of poetry has been 
altogether without effect upon his practice, but it has shown 
itself rather by some deficiency of refinement in his general 
manner than by very much that he has written in express con- 
formity with its requisitions. We might affirm, indeed, that its 
principle is as much contradicted and confuted by the greater 
part of his own poetry as it is by that of all languages and all 
times in which poetry has been written, or by the universal past 
experience of mankind in every age and country. He is a great 
poet, and has enriched our literature with much beautiful and 
noble writing, whatever be the method or principle upon which 
he constructs, or fancies that he constructs, his compositions. 
His Laodamia, without the exception of a single line, his Lonely 
Leech-gatherer, with the exception of very few lines ; his Euth, 
his Tintern Abbey, his Feast of Brougham, the Water Lily, the 
greater part of the Excursion, most of the Sonnets, his great 
Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood, and 
many of his shorter lyrical pieces, are nearly as unexceptionable 
in diction as they are deep and true in feeling, judged according 



462 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

to any rules or principles of art that are now patronized by any- 
body. It is true, indeed, that it will not do to look at anything 
that Wordsworth has written through the spectacles of that 
species of criticism which was in vogue among us in the last 
century ; we believe that in several of the pieces we have named 
even that narrow and superficial doctrine (if it could be recalled 
from the tomb) would find little or nothing to object to, but we 
fear it would find as little to admire ; it had no feeling or under- 
standing of the poetry of any other era than its own, — neither of 
that of Homer, nor that of the Greek dramatists, nor that of our 
own Elizabethan age, — and it certainly would not enter far into 
the spirit either of that of Wordsworth or of any of his eminent 
contemporaries or successors. It is part, and a great part, of 
what the literature of Germany has done for us within the last 
sixty years, that it has given a wider scope and a deeper insight 
to our perception and mode of judging of the poetical in all its 
forms and manifestations; and the poetry of Wordsworth has 
materially aided in establishing this revolution of taste and 
critical doctrine, by furnishing the English reader with some of 
the earliest and many of the most successful or most generally 
appreciated examples and illustrations of the precepts of the 
new faith. Even the errors of Wordsworth's poetical creed and 
practice, the excess to which he has sometimes carried his em- 
ployment of the language of the uneducated classes, and his 
attempts to extract poetical eff'ects out of trivial incidents and 
humble life, were fitted to be rather serviceable than injurious 
in the highly artificial state of our poetry when he began to write. 
He may not have succeeded in every instance in which he has 
tried to glorify the familiar and elevate the low, but he has 
nevertheless taught us that the domain of poetry is much wider 
and more various than it used to be deemed, that there is a great 
deal of it to be found where it was formerly little the fashion to 
look for anything of the kind, and that the poet does not abso- 
lutely require for the exercise of his art and the display of his 
powers what are commonly called illustrious or distinguished 
characters, and an otherwise dignified subject, any more than 
long and learned words. Of all his English contemporaries 
Wordsworth stands foremost and alone as the poet of common 
life. It is not his only field, nor perhaps the field in which he 
is greatest ; but it is the one which is most exclusively his own. 
He has, it is true, no humour or comedy of any kind in him 
(which is perhaps the explanation of the ludicrous touches that 
sometimes startle us in his serious poetry), and therefore he is not, 
and seldom attempts to be, what Burns was for his countrymen, 



WORDSWORTH. 463 

the poetic interpreter, and, as such, refiner as well as embalmer, 
of the wit and merriment of the common people : the writer by 
whom that title is to be won is yet to arise, and probably from 
among the people themselves : but of whatever is more tender 
or more thoughtful in the spirit of ordinary life in England the 
poetry of Wordsworth is the truest and most comprehensive 
transcript we possess. Many of his verses, embodying as they 
do the philosophy as well as the sentiment of this every-day 
human experience, have a completeness and impressiveness, as of 
texts, mottoes, proverbs, the force of which is universally felt, 
and has already worked them into the texture and substance of 
the language to a far greater extent, we apprehend, than has 
happened in the case of any contemporary writer. 

VVordsworth, though only a few years deceased, for he sur- 
vived till 1850, nearly sixty years after the publication of his 
first poetry, is already a classic ; and, extensively as he is now 
read and appreciated, any review of our national literature 
would be very incomplete without at least a few extracts from 
his works illustrative of the various styles in which he has 
written. As a specimen of what may be called his more peculiar 
manner, or that which is or used to be more especially under- 
stood by the style of the Lake School of poetry, we will begin 
with the well-known verses entitled The Fountain, a Conversa- 
tion, which, in his own classification, are included among what 
he designates Poems of Sentiment and Reflection, and are stated 
to have been composed in 1799 : — 

"We walked with open heart, and tongue 

Affectionate and trn,e, 
A pair of friends, though I was young, 

And Matthew seventy-two. 
We lay beneath a spreading oak, 

Beside a mossy seat ; 
And from the turf a fountain broke, 

And gurgled at our feet. 
" Now, Matthew !" said I, " let us match 

This water's pleasant tune 
With some old Border-song, or catch 

That suits a summer's noon ; 
Or of the church-clock and the chimes 

Sing here, beneath the shade, 
That half-mad thing of witty rhymes 

Which you last April made !" 
In silence Matthew lay, and eyed 

The spring beneath the tree ; 

And thus the dear old man replied, 

The grev-haired man of glee : 



464 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

" No check, no stay, this streamlet feara : 

How merrily it goes ! 
'Twill murmur on a thousand years, 

And flow as now it flows. 

And here, on this delightful day, 
I cannot choose but think 

How oft, a vigorous man, I lay 
Beside this fountain's brink. 

My eyes are dim with childish teaw, 

My heart is idly stirred, 
For the same sound is in my ears 

Which in those days I heard. 

Thus fares it still in our decay : 

And yet the wiser mind 
Mourns less for what age takes away 

Than what it leaves behind. 

The blackbird amid leafy trees. 

The lark above the hill. 
Let loose their carols when they please, 

Are quiet when they will. 

With nature never do they wage 
A foolish strife ; they see 

A happy youth, and their old age 
Is beautiful and free : 

But we are pressed by heavy laws ; 

And often, glad no more, 
We wear a face of joy, because 

We have been glad of yore. 

If there be one who need bemoan 
His kindred laid in earth. 

The household hearts that were his owiij 
It is the man of mirth. 

My days, my friend, are almost gone, 
My life has been approved, 

And many love me ; but by none 
Am I enough beloved." 

" Now, both himself and me he wrongs. 
The man who thus complains ! 

I live and sing my idle songs 
Upon these happy plains, 

And, Matthew, for thy children dead 

I'll be a son to thee !" 
At this he grasped my hand, and said, 

" Alas ! that cannot be !" 



WORDSWORTH. 465 

We rose up from the fountain-side ; 

And down the smooth descent 
Of the green sheep-track did we ghde ; 

And through the wood we went ; 

And, ere we came to Leonard's Eock, 

He sang those witty rhymes 
About the crazy old church-clock, 

And the bewildered chimes. 

The following, entitled The Affliction of Margaret, dated 1804, 
and classed among the Poems founded on the Affections, is more 
impassioned, but still essentially in the same style : — 

Where art thou, my beloved son, 
Where art thou, worse to me than dead ? 
Oh find me, prosperous or undone ! 
Or, if the grave be now thy bed, 
Why am I ignorant of the same, 
That I may rest ; and neither blame 
Nor sorrow may attend thy name ? 

Seven years, alas ! to have received 
No tidings of an only child ; 
To have despaired, have hoped, believed. 
And been for evermore beguiled ; 
Sometimes with thoughts of very bliss ! 
I catch at them, and then I miss ; 
Was ever darkness like to this ? 

« He was among the prime in worth, 

An object beauteous to behold ; 
Well born, well bred ; 1 sent him forth 
Ingenuous, innocent, and bold : 
If things ensued that wanted grace. 
As hath been said, they were not base ; 
And never blush was on my face. 

Ah ! little doth the young one dream, 
When full of play and childish cares. 
What power is in his wildest scream, 
Heard by his mother unawares ! 
He knows it not, he cannot guess : 
Years to a mother bring distress ; 
But do not make her love the less. 

Neglect me ! no, I suffered long 

From that ill thought ; and, being blind, 

Said, " Pride shall help me in my wrong : 

Kind mother have I been, as kind 

As ever breathed ;" and that is true ; 

I've wet my path with tears like dew, 

Weeping for him when no one knew. 

2 H 



466 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

My son, if thou "be tLiimMed, poor, 
Hopeless of honour and of gain, 
Oh ! do not dread thy mother's door ; 
Think not of me with grief and pain : 
I now can see with better eyes ; 
And worldly grandeur I despise, 
And Fortune with her gifts and lies. 

Alas ! the fowls of heaven have wings, 
And blasts of heaven will aid their flight • 
They mount — how short a voyage brings 
The wanderers back to their delight ! 
Chains tie us down by land and sea ; 
And wishes, vain as mine,' may be 
All that is left to comfort thee. 

Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan. 
Maimed, mangled, by inhuman men ; 
Or thou, upon a desert thrown, 
Inheritest the lion's den ; 
Or hast been summoned to the deep. 
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep 
An incommunicable sleep. 

I look for ghosts ; but none will force 
Their way to me : — 'tis falsely said 
That there was ever intercourse 
Between the living and the dead ; 
Tor, surely, then I should have sight 
Of him I wait for day and night 
With love and longings infinite. 

My apprehensions come in crowds ; 
I dread the rustling of the grass ; 
The very shadows of the clouds 
Have power to shake me as they pass ; 
I question things, and do not find 
One that will answer to my mind ; 
And all the world appears unkind. 

Beyond participation lie 
My troubles, and beyond relief : 
If any chance to heave a sigh, 
They pity me, and not my grief. 
Then come to me, my Son, or send 
Some tidings that my woes may end ; 
I have no other earthly friend ! 

Here is another from the same class, and still in the same 
style, dated 1798. The verses are very beautiful; they bear 
some resemblance to the touching old Scotch ballad called Lady 
Anna Bothwell's Lament, beginning 



WORDSWORTH. 467 

Balow, my boy, lie still and sleep ; 
It grieves me sair to see thee weep — 

of wMcli there is a copy in Percy's Keliques, and others, differ- 
ing considerably from that, in other collections : — 

Her eyes are wild, her head is bare, 
The sun has burned her coal-black hair ; 
Her eyebrows have a rusty stain, 
And she came far from over the main. 
She has a baby on her arm. 

Or else she were alone : 
And underneath the haystack warm, 

And on the greenwood stone. 
She talked and sung the woods among, 
And it was in the English tongue. 

" Sweet babe, they say that I am mad, 
But nay, my heart is far too glad ; 
And I am happy when I sing 
Full many a sad and doleful thing : 
Then, lovely baby, do not fear ! 
I pray thee, have no fear of me ; 
But safe as in a cradle, here. 
My lovely baby, shalt thou be : 
To thee I know too much I owe ; 
I cannot work thee any woe. 

A fire was once within my brain ; 
And in my head a dull, dull pain ; 
And fiendish faces, one, two, three, 
Hung at my breast, and pulled at me ; 
But then there came a sight of joy, 
It came at once to do me good ; 
I waked, and saw my little boy. 
My little boy of flesh and blood ; 
Oh joy for me that sight to see I 
For he was there, and only he. 

Suck, little babe, oh suck again ! 
It cools my blood, it cools my brain ; 
Thy lips I feel them, baby ! they 
Draw from my heart the pain away. 
Oh ! press me with thy little hand ; 
It loosens something at my chest ; 
About that tight and deadly band 
I feel thy little fingers prest. 
The breeze I see is in the tree : 
It comes to cool my babe and me. 

Oh ! love me, love me, little boy ! 
Thou art thy mother's only joy ; 



468 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

And do not dread the waves below 
When o'er the sea-rock's edge we go ; 
The high crag cannot work me harm, 
'Nov leaping torrents when they howl ; 
The babe I carry on my arm 
He saves for me my precious soul ; 
Then happy lie ; for blest am I ; 
Without me my sweet babe would die. 

Then do not fear, my boy ! for thee 

Bold as a lion will I be : 

And I will always be thy guide, 

Through hollow snows and rivers wide. 

I'll build an Indian bower ; I know 

The leaves that make the softest bed : 

And if from me thou wilt not go, 

But still be true till I am dead, 

My pretty thing, then thou shalt sing 

As merry as the birds in spring. 

Thy father cares not for my breast, 
'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest ; 
'Tis all thine own ! — and, if its hue 
Be changed, that was so fair to view, 
'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove ! 
My beauty, little child, is flown, 
But thou wilt live with me in love ; 
And what if my poor cheek be brown ? 
'Tis well for thee, thou canst not see 
How pale and wan it else would be. 

Dread not their taunts, my little life ; 
I am thy father's wedded wife ; 
And underneath the spreading tree 
We two will live in honesty. 
If his sweet boy he could forsake. 
With me he never would have stayed ; 
From him no harm my babe can take ; 
But he, poor man ! is wretched made ; 
And every day we two will pray 
For him that 's gone and far away. 

I '11 teach my boy the sweetest things, 
I '11 teach him how the owlet sings. 
My little babe ! thy lips are still. 
And thou hast almost sucked thy fill. 

Where art thou gone, my own dear child ? 

What wicked looks are those I see ? 
Alas ! alas ! that look so wild. 
It never, never came from me : 
If thou art mad, my pretty lad, 
Then I must be for ever sad. 



WORDSWORTH. 469 

Oh ! smile on me, my little lamb ! 

For I thy own dear mother am. 

My love for thee has well been tried : 

I 've sought thy father far and wide. 

I know the poisons of the shade, 

I know the earth-nuts fit for food : 

Then, pretty dear, be not afraid : 

We '11 find thy father in the wood. 

Now laugh and be gay, to the woods away ! 

And there, my babe, we '11 live for aye." 

But mucli, perhaps we might say the greater part, of Words- 
worth's poetry is in a very different style or manner. Take, for 
example, his noble Laodamia, dated 1814, and in the later editions 
placed among what he calls Poems of the Imagination, though 
formerly classed as one of the Poems founded on the Affec- 
tions : — 

" With sacrifice before the rising morn 

Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired ; 

And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn 

Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required : 

Celestial pity I again implore : — 

Eestore him to my sight — great Jove, restore !" 

So speaking, and by fervent love endowed 

With faith, the suppliant heavenward lifts her hands ; 

While, like the sun emerging from a cloud, 

Her countenance brightens — and her eye expands ; 

Her bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows ; 

And she expects the issue in repose. 

terror ! what hath she perceived ? joy ! 
What doth she look on? Whom doth she behold? 
Her Hero slain upon the beach of Troy ? 
His vital presence ? his corporeal mould ? 
It is — if sense deceive her not — 'tis He ! 
And a God leads him, winged Mercury ! 

Mild Hermes spake — and touched her with his wand 

That calms all fear ; " Such grace hath crowned thy prayer, 

Laodamia ! that at Jove's command 

Thy husband walks the paths of upper air : 

He comes to tarry with thee three hours' space ; 

Accept the gift, behold him face to face !" 

Forth sprang the impassioned Queen her Lord to clasp ; 

Again that consummation she assayed ; 

But unsubstantial form eludes her grasp 

As often as that eager grasp was made. 

The Phantom parts — but parts to re-unite. 

And re-assume his place before her sight. 



470 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

" Protesilaus, lo ! thy p;uide is gone ! 

Confirm, I pray, the Vision with thy voice : 

This is our palace, — yonder is thy throne ; 

Speak, and the floor thou tread'st on will rejoice. 

Not to appal me have the Gods bestowed 

This precious boon ; and blest a sad abode." 

" Great Jove, Laodamia ! doth not leave 

His gifts imperfect : — Spectre though I be, 

I am not sent to scare thee or deceive ; 

But in reward of thy fidelity. 

And something also did my worth obtain ; 

For fearless virtue bringeth boundless gain. 

Thou knowest, the Delphic oracle foretold 

That the first Greek who touched the Trojan strand 

Should die ; but me the threat could not withhold : 

A generous cause a victim did demand ; 

And forth I leapt upon the sandy plain ; 

A self-devoted chief — by Hector slain." 

" Supreme of Heroes — bravest, noblest, best ! 

Thy matchless courage I bewail no more. 

Which then, when tens of thousands were deprest 

By doubt, propelled thee to the fatal shore : 

Thou found'st — and I forgive thee — here thou art — 

A nobler counsellor than my poor heart. 

But thou, though capable of sternest deed, 

Wert kind as resolute, and good as brave ; 

And he, whose power restores thee, hath decreed 

That thou should'st cheat the malice of the grave ; 

Eedundant are thy locks, thy lips as fair 

As when their breath enriched Thessalian air. 

No Spectre greets me, — no vain Shadow this ; 

Come, blooming Hero, place thee by my side ! 

Give, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss 

To me, this day, a second time thy bride !" 

Jove frowned in heaven : the conscious Parcae threw 

Upon those roseate lips a Stygian hue. 

" This visage tells thee that my doom is past : 

Nor should the change be mourned, even if the joys 

Of sense were able to return as fast 

And surely as they vanish. — Earth destroys 

Those raptures duly — Erebus disdains : 

Calm pleasures there abide — majestic pains. 

Be taught, faithful Consort, to control 

Eebellious passion : for the Gods approve 

The depth, and not the tumult of the soul ; 

A fervent, not ungovernable love. 

Thy transports moderate ; and meekly mourn 

When I depart, for brief is my sojourn." — 



WORDSWORTH. 471 

'' Ah, wherefore ? — Did not Hercules by force 

Wrest from the guardian monster of the tomb 

Alcestis, a reanimated corse, 

Given back to dwell on earth in vernal bloom ? 

Medea's spells disper&ed the weight of years, 

And Aeson stood a youth 'mid youthful peers. 

The Gods to us are merciful — and they 

Yet further may relent : for mightier far 

Than strength of nerve and sinew, or the sway 

Of magic potent over sun and star, 

Is love, though oft to agony distrest. 

And though his favourite seat be feeble woman's breast. 

But if thou goest I follow " — " Peace !" he said — 

She looked upon him and was calmed and cheered ; 

The ghastly colour from his lips had fled ; 

In his deportment, shape, and mien appeared 

Elysian beauty, melancholy grace. 

Brought from a pensive, though a happy place. 

He spake of love, such love as Spirits feel 

In worlds whose course is equable and pure ; 

No fears to beat away — no strife to heal — 

The past unsighed for, and the future sure ; 

Spake of heroic acts in graver mood 

Eevived, with finer harmony pursued ; 

Of all that is most beauteous — imaged there 

In happier beauty ; more pellucid streams, 

An ampler ether, a diviner air, 

And fields invested with purpureal gleams ; 

Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day 

Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey. 

Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned 

That privilege by virtue. — " III," said he, 

" The end of man's existence I discerned. 

Who from ignoble games and revelry 

Could draw, when we had parted, vain delight. 

While tears were thy best pastime day and night ; 

And while my youthful peers before my eyes 

(Each hero following his peculiar bent) 

Prepared themselves for glorious enterprise 

By martial sports, — or, seated in the tent, 

Chieftains and kings in council were detained ; 

What time the fleet at Aulis lay enchained. 

The wished-for wind was given : — I then revolved 

The- oracle upon the silent sea ; 

And, if no worthier led the way, resolved 

That, of a thousand vessels, mine should be 

The foremost prow in pressing to the strand, — 

Mine the first blood that tinged the Trojan sand. 



472 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Yet bitter, oftimes bitter, was the pang 

Wiien of tby loss I thought, beloved wife ! 

On thee too fondly did my memory hang, 

And on the joys we shared in mortal life, — 

The paths which we had trod — these fountains, flowei3 

My new-planned cities, and unfinished towers. 

But should suspense permit the foe to cry, 
' Behold, they tremble ! — haughty their array, 
Yet of their number no one dares to die ?' 
In soul I swept the indignity away ; 
Old frailties then recurred : — but lofty thought, 
In act embodied, my deliverance wrought. 

And thou, though strong in love, art all too weak 

In reason, in self-government too slow ; 

I counsel thee by fortitude to seek 

Our blest reunion in the shades below. 

The invisible world with thee hath sympathised ; 

Be thy affections raised and solemnised. 

Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend — 
Seeking a higher object. Love was given, 
Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end ; 
For this the passion to excess was driven — 
That self might be annulled ; her bondage prove 
The fetters of a dream, opposed to love." ^ 

Aloud she shrieked ! for Hermes reappears ! 

Bound the dear shade she would have clung — ' tis vain 

The hours are past — too brief had they been years ; 

And him no mortal effort can detain : 

Swift, towards the realms that know not earthly day, 

He through the portal takes his silent way. 

And on the palace floor a lifeless corse she lay. 

She — who, though warned, exhorted, and reproved, 
Thus died, from passion desperate to a crime — 
By the just Gods, whom no weak pity moved, 
Was doomed to wear out her appointed time, 
Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers 
Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers. 

Yet tears to mortal suffering are due ; 
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown 
Are mourned by man, — and not by man alone. 



i The reader of Milton will remember the same idea in the eighth book of 
Paradise Lost : — 

" Love refines 
The thoughts, and heart enlarges ; hath his seat 
In reason, and is judicious ; is the scale 
By which to heavenly love thou may'st ascend.'^ 



WORDSWORTH. 473 

As fondly he believes. — Upon the side 
Of Hellespont (such faith was entertained) 
A knot of spiry trees for ages grew 
From out the tomb of him for whom she died ; 
And ever, when such stature they had gained 
That Ilium's walls were subject to their view, 
The trees' tall summits withered at the sight ; 
A constant interchange of growth and blight. 

In the same grand strain is very much especially of Words- 
worth's later poetry. Neither puerility nor oyer familiarity of 
diction, with whatever other faults they may be chargeable, can 
well be attributed to either the Excursion, or the Sonnets, or 
the Odes. But it is, on the other hand, a misconception to 
imagine that this later poetry is for the most part enveloped in a 
haze through which the meaning is only to be got at by initiated 
eyes. Nothing like this is the case. The Excursion, published 
in 1814, for instance, with the exception of a very few passages, 
is a poem that he who runs may read, and the greater part of 
which may be apprehended by readers of all classes as readily as 
almost any other poetry in the language. We may say the same 
even of The Prelude, or Introduction to the Eecluse (intended to 
consist of three Parts, of which The Excursion is the second, the 
first remaining in manuscript, and the third having been only 
planned), which was begun in 1799 and completed in 1805, 
although not published till a few months after the author's death 
in 1850 ; an elaborate poem, in fourteen books, of eminent interest 
as the poet's history of himself, and of the growth of his own 
mind, as well as on other accounts, and long before charac- 
terized by Coleridge, to whom it is addressed, as 

" An Orphic song indeed, 
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts 
To their own music chanted."* 



* In reference, no doubt, to Wordsworth's own lines, in the First Book of 
the Poem : — 

" Some philosophic song 
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life ; 
With meditations passionate from deep 
Recesses in man's heart, immortal verse 
Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre." 

And here, agam, we have the echo of Milton's line, in the Third Book of 
Paradise Lost :— 

" With other notes than to the Orphean lyre." 



474 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 



Coleridge. 

In all tliat constitutes artistic character the poetry of Coleridge 
is a contrast to that of Wordsworth. Coleridge, born in 1772, 
published the earliest of his poetry that is now remembered in 
1796, in a small volume containing also some pieces by Charles 
Lamb, to which some by Charles Lloyd were added in a second 
edition the following year. It was not till 1800, after he had 
produced and printed separately his Ode to the Departing Year 
(1796), his noble ode entitled France (1797), his Fears in Soli- 
tude (1798), and his translations of both parts of Schiller's 
^Vallenstein, that he was first associated as a poet and author 
with Wordsworth, in the second volume of whose Lyrical Ballads, 
published in 1800, appeared, as the contributions of an anonymous 
friend, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Foster Mother's Tale, Night- 
ingale, and Love. " I should not have requested this assist- 
ance," said Wordsworth, in his preface, " had I not believed 
that the poems of my friend would, in a great measure, have the 
same tendency as my own, and that, though there would be 
found a difference, there would be found no discordance, in the 
colours of our style ; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do 
almost entirely coincide." Coleridge's own account, however, is 
somewhat different. In his Biographia Literaria, he tells us 
that, besides the Ancient Mariner, he was preparing for the 
conjoint publication, among other poems, the Dark Ladie and 
the Christabel, in which he should have more nearly realized his 
ideal than he had done in his first attempt, when the volume 
was brought out with so much larger a portion of it the produce 
of Wordsworth's industr}^ than his own, that his few compo- 
sitions, " instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an inter- 
polation of heterogeneous matter ;" and then he adds, in reference 
to the long preface in which Wordsworth had expounded his 
theoiy of poetry, " With many parts of this preface in the sense 
attributed to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to 
authorize, I never concurred ; but, on the contrary, objected to 
them as erroneous in principle and contradictory (in appearance 
at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the 
author's own practice in the greater number of the poems them- 
selves." 

Coleridge's poetry is remarkable for the perfection of its exe- 
cution, for the exquisite art with which its divine spirit is 
endowed with formal expression. The subtly woven words, with 
all their sky colours, seem to grow out of the thought or emotion, 



COLERIDGE. 475 

as the flower from its stalk, or the flame from its feeding oil. 
The music of his verse, too, especially of what he has written 
in rhjme, is as sweet and as characteristic as anything in the 
language, placing him for that rare excellence in the same small 
band with Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher (in their 
lyrics), and Milton, and Collins, and Shelley, and Tennyson. It 
was probably only quantity that was wanting to make Coleridge 
the greatest poet of his day. Certainly, at least, some things 
that he has written have not been surpassed, if they have been 
matched, by any of his contemporaries. And (as indeed has 
been the case with almost all great poets) he continued to write 
better and better the longer he wrote; some of his happiest 
verses were the produce of his latest years. To quote part of 
what we have said in a paper published immediately^ after Cole- 
ridge's death : — " Not only, as we proceed frcm his earlier to his 
later compositions, does the execution become much more artistic 
and perfect, but the informing spirit is refined and purified — the 
tenderness grows more delicate and deep, the fire brighter and 
keener, the sense of beauty more subtle and exquisite. Yet from 
the first there was in all he wrote the divine breath which essen- 
tially makes poetry what it is. There was ' the shaping spirit 
of imagination,' evidently of soaring pinion and full of strength, 
though as yet sometimes unskilfully directed, and encumbered 
in its flight by an affluence of power which it seemed hardly to 
know how to manage : hence an unselecting impetuosity in 
these early compositions, never indicating anything like poverty 
of thought, but producing occasionally considerable awkwardness 
and turgidity of style, and a declamatory air, from which no 
poetry was ever more free than that of Coleridge in its maturer 
form. Yet even among these juvenile productions are many 
passages, and some whole pieces, of perfect gracefulness, and 
radiant with the purest sunlight of poetry. There is, for example, 
the most beautiful delicacy of sentiment, as well as sweetness 
of versification and expression, in the following lines, simple as 
they are : — 

Maid of my love, sweet Genevieve ! 

In beauty's light you olide along ; 

Your eye is like the star of eve. 

And sweet your voice as Seraph's song. 

Yet not your heavenly beauty gives 

This heart with passion soft to glow : 

Within your soul a voice there lives ! 

It bids you hear the tale of woe. 

When, sinking low, the sufferer wan ' 

Beholds no hand outstretched to save. 



476 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

. Fair, as the bosom of the swan 
That rises graceful o'er the wave, 
I 've seen your breast with pity heave ; 
And therefore love I you, sweet Genevieve ! 

And the following little picture, entitled Time, Eeal and 
Imaginary, is a gem worthy of the poet in the most thoughtful 
and philosophic strength of his faculties : — 

On the wide level of a mountain's head 
(I knew not where, but 'twas some fairy place), 
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, 
Two lovely children ran an endless race ; 

A sister and a brother ! 

That far outstripped the other ; 
Yet ever runs she with reverted face, 
And looks and listens for the boy behind ; 

For he, alas ! is blind ! 
O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed. 
And knows not whether he be first or last. 

In a different manner, and more resembling that of these early 
poems in general, are many passages of great power in the 
Monody on the Death of Chatterton, and in the Eeligious 
Musings, the latter written in 1794, when the author was only 
in his twenty-third year. And, among other remarkable pieces 
of a date not much later, might be mentioned the ode entitled 
France, written in 1797, which Shelley regarded as the finest 
ode in the language ; his Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, written, 
we believe, about the same time; his ode entitled Dejection; 
his blank verse lines entitled The Nightingale ; his Eime of the 
Ancient Mariner, and his exquisite verses entitled Love, to 
which last for their union of passion with delicacy, and of both 
with the sweetest, richest music, it would be difficult to find a 
match in our own or any language. 

" Of Coleridge's poetry, in its most matured form and in its 
best specimens, the most distinguishing characteristics are vivid- 
ness of imagination and subtlety of thought, combined with 
unrivalled beauty and expressiveness of diction, and the most 
exquisite melody of verse. With the exception of a vein of 
melancholy and meditative tenderness, flowing rather from a 
contemplative survey of the mystery — the strangely mingled 
good and evil — of all things human, than connected with any 
individual interests, there is not in general much of passion in 
his compositions, and he is not well fitted, therefore, to become 
a very popular poet, or a favourite with the multitude. His 
love itself, warm and tender as it is, is still Platonic and spiritual 



COLERIDGE. 477 

in its tenderness, rather tlian a thing of flesh and blood. There 
is nothing in his poetry of the pulse of fire that throbs in that 
of Burns ; neither has he much of the homely every-day truth, 
the proverbial and universally applicable wisdom, of Words- 
worth. *Coleridge was, far more than either of these poets, ' of 
imagination all compact.' The fault of his poetry is the same 
that belongs to that of Spenser ; it is too purely or unalloyedly 
poetical. But rarely, on the other hand, has there existed an 
imagination in which so much originality and daring M^ere asso 
ciated and haimonized with so gentle and tremblingly delicate a 
sense of beauty. Some of his minor poems especially, for the 
richness of their colouring combined with the most perfect 
finish, can be compared only to the flowers which spring up 
into loveliness at the touch of ' great creating nature.' The 
words, the rhyme, the whole flow of the music seem to be not so 
much the mere expression or sign of the thought as its blossoming 
or irradiation — of the bright essence the equally bright though 
sensible effluence."* 

In most of Coleridge's latest poetry, however, along with this 
perfection of execution, in which he was unmatched, we have 
more body and warmth — more of the inspiration of the heart 
mingling with that of the fancy. The following lines are 
entitled Work without Hope, and are stated to have b3en com- 
posed 21st February, 1827 : — 

All nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair — 
The bees are stirring — birds are on the wing — 
And winter, slumbering in the open air, 
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring ! 
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, 
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. 

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow. 
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. 
Bloom, ye amaranths ! bloom for whom ye may, 
For me ye bloom not ! Grlide, rich streams, away ! 
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll : 
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ? 
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, 
And hope without an object cannot live. 

To about the same date belongs the following, entitled Youth 
and Age : — 

Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying, 
Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee — 



* Printing Machine, No. 12, for 16th August, 1834. 



478 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Both were mine ! Life went a maying 
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy, 

When I was young ! 
When I was young? — Ah, woeful when ! 
Ah ! for the change 'twixt now and then ! 
This breathing house not built with hands, 
This body that does me grievous wi'ong, 
O'er airy cliffs and glittering sands 
How lightly then it flashed along : — 
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore, 
On winding lakes and rivers wide, 
That ask no aid of sail or oar, 
That fear no spite of wind or tide ! 
Nought cared this body for wind or weather 
When youth and I lived in't together. 

Flowers are lovely ; love is fl.ower-like ; 
Friendship is a sheltering tree ; 
! the joys that came down shower-like, 
Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, 
Ere I was old ! 
Ere I was old ? — Ah, woeful ere, 
"^rhich tells me. Youth's no longer here ! 

Youth ! for years so many and sweet 
'Tis known that thou and I were one ; 
I'll think it but a fond conceit — 

It cannot be, that thou art gone ! 
Thy vesper-bell hath not yet tolled : — 
And thou wert aye a masker bold ! 
What strange disguise hast now put on, 
To make believe that thou art gone ? 

1 see these locks in silvery slips, 
This drooping gait, this altered size : 
But springtide blossoms on thy lips. 
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes f 
Life is but thought : so think I will 
That Youth and I are house-mates still. 

Dew-di"ops are the gems of morning, 
But the tears of mournful eve ! 
Where no hope is, life's a warning 
That only serves to make us grieve, 

When we are old : 
TTiat only serves to make us grieve. 
With oft and tedious taking leave ; 
Like some poor nigh-related guest, 
That may not rudely be dismist, 
Yet hath outstayed his welcome while, 
And tells the jest without the smile. 

The following may have been written a few years later. 



COLERIDGE. 479 

It winds up a prose dialogue between two girls and their elderly 
male friend the Poet, or Improvisatore, as he is more familiarly 
styled, who, after a most eloquent description of that rare mutual 
love, the possession of which he declares would be more than 
an adequate rew^ard for the rarest virtue, to the remark, " Surely, 
he who has described it so well must have possessed it ?" replies, 
" If he were worthy to have possessed it, and had believingly 
anticipated and not found it, how bitter the disappointment !" 
and then, after a pause, breaks out into verse thus : — 

Yes, yes ! that boon, life's richest treat, 
He had, or fancied that he had ; 
Say, 'twas but in his own conceit — 

The fancy made him glad ! 
Crown of his cup, and garnish of his dish, 
The boon prefigured in his earUest wish, 
The fair fulfilment of his poesy. 
When his young heart first yearned for sympathy ! 
But e'en the meteor offspring of the brain 

Unnourished wane ; 
Faith asks her daily bread, 
And fancy must be fed. 
Now so it chanced — from wet or dry, 
It boots not how — I know not why — 
She missed her wonted food ; and quickly 
Poor fancy staggered and grew sickly. 
Then came a restless state, 'twixt yea and naj^, 
His faith was fixed, his heart all ebb and flow j 
Or like a bark, in some half-sheltered bay. 
Above its anchor driving to and fro. 
That boon, which but to have possest 
In a belief gave life a zest — 
Uncertain both what it had been. 
And if by error lost, or luck ; 
And what it was ; — an evergreen 
Which some insidious blight had struck. 
Or annual flower, which, past its blov/, 
No vernal spell shall e'er revive ! 
Uncertain, and afraid to know. 

Doubts tossed him to and fro : 
Hope keeping Love, Love Hope, alive. 
Like babes bewildered in the snow. 
That cling and huddle from the cold 
In hollow tree or ruined fold. 
Those sparkHng colours, once his boast. 

Fading, one by one away, 
Thin and hueless as a ghost, 

Poor fancy on her sick-bed lay ; 



480 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Ill at a distance, worse when near, 
Telling her dreams to jealous fear ! 
¥/here was it then, the sociable sprite 
That crowned the poet's cup and decked his dish ! 
Poor shadow cast from an unsteady wish. 
Itself a substance by no other right 
But that it intercepted reason's light ; 
It dimmed his eye, it darkened on his brow : 
A peevish mood, a tedious time, I trow ! 
Thank heaven ! 'tis not so now. 

bliss of blissful hours ! 
The boon of heaven's decreeing, 
"While yet in Eden's bowers 
Dwelt the first husband and his sinless mate ! 
The one sweet plant, which, piteous heaven agreeing. 
They bore with them through Eden's closing gate ! 
Of life's gay summer tide the sovran rose ! 
Late autumn's amaranth, that more fragrant blows 
AVhen passion's flowers all fall or fade ; 
If this were ever his in outward being. 
Or but his own true love's projected shade, 
Now that at length by certain proof he knows 
That, whether real or a magic show, 
Whate'er it was, it is no longer so ; 
Though heart be lonesome, hope laid low, 
Yet, lady, deem him not unblest ; 
The certainty that struck hope dead 
Hath left contentment in her stead r 
And that is next to best ! 

And still more perfect and altogether exquisite, we think, 
than anything we have yet given, is the foUowingj entitled 
Love, Hope, and Patience, in Education : — 

O'er wayward childhood would'st thou hold firm rule. 
And sun thee in the light of happy faces ; 
Love, Hope, and Patience, these must .be thy gi-aces, 
And in thine own heart let them first keep school. 
For, as old Atlas on his broad neck places 
Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it, — so 
Do these upbear the little world below 
Of Education, — Patience, Love, and Hope. 
Methinks, I see them grouped in seemly show, 
The straitened arms upraised, the palms aslope, 
And robes that touching, as adown they flow. 
Distinctly blend, like snow embossed in snow. 

part them never ! If Hope prostrate lie, 
Love too will sink and die. 



SOUTHEY. 481 

But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive 

From her own life that Hope is yet alive ; 

And, bending o'er with soul-transfusing eyes, 

And the soft murmurs of the mother dove, 

Woos back the fleeting spirit, and half supplies : — 

Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love. 

Yet haply there will come a weary day, 

When overtasked at length 
Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way. 
Then, with a statue's smile, a statue's strength, 
Stands the mute sister. Patience, nothing loth, 
And both supporting does the work of both. 



SoUTHEY. 

Coleridge died in 1834 ; his friend Southey, born three years 
later, survived to 1843. If Coleridge wrote too little poetry, 
Southey may be said to have written too much and too rapidly. 
Southey, as well as Coleridge, has been popularly reckoned one 
of the Lake poets ; but it is difficult to assign any meaning to 
that name which should entitle it to comprehend either the one 
or the other. Southey, indeed, was, in the commencement of 
his career, the associate of Wordsworth and Coleridge ; a portion 
of his first poem, his Joan of Arc, published in 1796, was written 
by Coleridge ; and he afterwards took up his residence, as well 
as Wordsworth, among the lakes of Westmoreland. But, although 
in his first volume of minor poems, published in 1797, there was 
something of the same simplicity or plainness of style, and choice 
of subjects from humble life, by which Wordsworth sought to 
distinguish himself about the same time, the manner of the one 
writer bore only a very superficial resemblance to that of the 
other; whatever it was, whether something quite original, or 
only, in the main, an inspiration caught from the Germans, that 
gave its peculiar character to Wordsworth's poetry, it was 
wanting in Southey's ; he was evidently, with all his ingenuity 
and fertility, and notwithstanding an ambition of originality 
which led him to be continually seeking after strange models, 
from Arabian and Hindoo mythologies to Latin hexameters, of 
a genius radically imitative, and not qualified to put forth its 
strength except while moving in a beaten track and under the 
guidance of long-established rules. Southey was by nature a 
conservative in literature as well as in politics, and the eccen- 
tricity of his Thalabas and Kehamas was as merely spasmodic 
as the Jacobinism of his Wat Tyler. But even Thalaba and 

2i 



482 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Kehama, whatever they may be, are surely not poems of the 
Lake school. And in most of his other poems, especially in his 
latest epic, Eoderick, the Last of the Goths, Southey is in verse 
what he always was in prose, one of the most thoroughly and 
unaffectedly English of our modern writers. The verse, how- 
ever, is too like prose to be poetry of a very high order ; it is 
flowing and eloquent, but has little of the distinctive life or 
lustre of poetical composition. There is much splendour and 
beauty, however, in the Curse of Kehama, the most elaborate of 
his long poems. 



Scott. 

Walter Scott, again, was never accounted one of the Lake 
poets ; yet he, as well as Wordsworth and Coleridge, was early 
a drinker at the fountain of German poetry ; his commencing 
publication was a translation of Burger's Lenore (1796), and 
the spirit and manner of his original compositions were, from 
the first, evidently and powerfully influenced by what had thus 
awakened his poetical faculty. His robust and manly character 
of mind, however, and his strong nationalism, with the innate 
disposition of his imagination to live in the past rather than in 
the future, saved him from being seduced into either the 
puerilities or the extravagances to which other imitators of the 
German writers among us were thought to have, more or less, 
given way ; and, having soon found in the popular ballad-poetry 
of his own country all the qualities which had most attracted 
him in his foreign favourites, with others which had an equal or 
still greater charm for his heart and fancy, he henceforth gave 
himself up almost exclusively to the more congenial inspiration 
of that native minstrelsy. His poems are all lays and romances 
of chivalry, but infinitely finer than any that had ever before 
been written. With all their irregularity and carelessness 
(qualities which in some sort are characteristic of and essential 
to this kind of poetry), that element of life in all writing, which 
comes of the excited feeling and earnest belief of the writer, is 
never wanting ; this animation, fervour, enthusiasm, — call it by 
what name we will, — exists in greater strength in no poetry 
than in that of Scott, redeeming a thousand defects, and triumph- 
ing over all the reclamations of criticism. It was this, no 
doubt, more than anything else, which at once took the public 
admiration by storm. All cultivated and perfect enjoyment of 
poetry, or of any other of the fine arts, is partly emotional, partly 



SCOTT. 483 

critical ; the enjoyment and appreciation are only perfect M^hen 
these two qualities are blended ; but most of the poetry that had 
been produced among us in modern times had aimed at affording 
chiefly, if not exclusively, a critical gratification. The Lay of 
the Last Minstrel (1805) surprised readers of all degrees with a 
long and elaborate poem, which carried them onward with an 
excitement of heart as well as of head which many of them had 
never experienced before in the perusal of poetry. The narrative 
form of the poem no doubt did much to produce this effect, giving 
to it, even without the poetry, the interest and enticement of a 
novel ; but all readers, even the least tinctured with a literary 
taste, felt also, in a greater or less degree, the charm of the 
verse, and the poetic glow with vv'^hich the work was all alive. 
Marmion (1808) carried the same feelings to a much higher 
pitch; it is undoubtedly Scott's greatest poem, or the one at 
any rate in which the noblest passages are found ; though the 
more domestic attractions of the Lady of the Lake (1810) made 
it the most popular on its first appearance. Meanwhile, his 
success, the example he had set, and the tastes which he had 
awakened in the public mind, had affected our literature to an 
extent in various directions which has scarcely been sufficiently 
appreciated. Notwithstanding the previous appearance of 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and some other writers, it 
was Scott who first in his day made poetry the raige, and with 
him properly commences the busy poetical production of the 
period we are now reviewing ; those who had been in the field 
before him put on a new activity, and gave to the world their 
principal works, after his appearance ; and it was not till then 
that the writer who of all the poets of this age attained the 
widest blaze of reputation, eclipsing Scott himself, commenced 
his career. But what is still more worthy of note is, that Scott's 
poetry impressed its own character upon all the poetry that was 
produced among us for many years after : it put an end to long 
works in verse of a didactic or merely reflective character, and 
directed the current of all writing of that kind into the form of 
narrative. Even Wordsworth's Excursion (1814) is for the 
most part a collection of tales. If Scott's own genius, indeed, 
were to be described by any single epithet, it would be called 
a narrative genius. Hence, when he left off writing verse, he 
betook himself to the production of fictions in prose, which were 
really substantially the same thing with his poems, and in that 
freer form of composition succeeded in achieving a second repu- 
tation still more brilliant than his first. 

We cannot make room for the whole of the battle in Marmion ; 



484 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

and the following extracts, which describe the fighting, lose part 
of their effect by being separated from the picture of Marmion's 
death-scene, with the pathos and touching solemnity of which they 
are in the original canvas so finely intermingled and relieved ; 
but, even deprived of the advantages of this contrast, most 
readers will probably agree with a late eloquent critic, that, " of 
all the poetical battles which have been fought from the days of 
Homer, there is none comparable for interest and animation — for 
breadth of drawing and magnificence of effect — with this :"* — 

Blount and Fitz-Eustace rested still 
With Lady Clare upon the Mil ; 
On which (for far the day was spent) 
The western sun-beams now were bent. 
The cry they heard, its meaniQg knew, 
Could plain their distant comrades view : 
Sadly to Blount did Eustace say, 
" Unworthy office here to stay ! 
No hope of gilded spurs to-day. — 
But see ! look up — on Flodden bent, 
The Scottish foe has fired his tent." 

And sudden, as he spoke, 
From the sharp ridges 'of the hiU, 
All downward to the banks of Till 

Was wreathed in sable smoke. 
Vclumed and fast, and rolling far, 
The cloud enveloped Scotland's war, ' 

As down the hill they broke ; 
Nor martial shout, nor minstrel tone, 
Announced their march ; their tread alone. 
At times one warning trumpet blown, 

At times a stifled hum, 
Told England, from his mountain throne 

King James did rushing come. — 
Scarce could they hear, or see, their foes 
Until at weapon point they close. 
They close, in clouds of smoke and dust, 
With sword-sway, and with lance's thrust ; 

And such a yell was there 
Of sudden and portentous birth, 
As if men fought upon the earth 

And fiends iu upper air ; 
life and death were in the shout, 
Kecoil and rally, charge and rout, 

And triumph and despair. 
Long looked the anxious squires ; their eye 
Could in the darkness nought descry. 

* Jeiirey, in Edinburgh Eeview. 



SCOTT. 485 

At lengtli the freslieniiig western blast 
Aside the shroud of battle cast. 
And, first, the ridge of mingled spears 
Above the brightening cloud appears ; 
And in the smoke the pennons flew, 
As in the storm the white sea-mew. 
Then marked they, dashing broad and far, 
The broken billows of the war. 
And plumed crests of chieftains brave. 
Floating like foam upon the wave ; 

But nought distinct they see : 
Wide raged the battle on the plain ; 
Spears shook and falchions flashed amain ; 
Fell England's arrow-flight like rain ; 
Crests rose, and stooped, and rose again, 

Wild and disorderly. 
Amid the scene of tumult, high 
They saw Lord Marmion's falcon fly : 
And stainless Tunstall's banner white, 
And Edmund Howard's lion bright. 
Still bear them bravely in the fight ; 

Although against them come 
Of gallant Gordons many a one. 
And many a stubborn Badenoch man, 
And many a rugged border clan, 

With Huntley, and with Home. 

Far on the left, unseen the while, 
Stanley broke Lennox and Argyle ; 
Though there the western mountaineer 
Eushed with bare bosom on the spear. 
And flung the feeble targe aside, 
And with both hands the broadsword plied. 
'Twas vain : — but Fortune, on the right. 
With fickle smile cheered Scotland's fight. 
Then fell that spotless banner white. 

The Howard's lion fell ; 
Yet still Lord Marmion's falcon flew 
With wavering flight, while fiercer grew 

Around the battle -yell. 
The Border slogan rent the sky ! 
A Home ! a Gordon ! was the cry : 

Loud were the clanging blows ; 
Advanced, — forced back, — now low, now high. 

The pennon sunk and rose ; 
As bends the bark's mast in the gale. 
When rent are rigging, shrouds, and sail, 

It wavered 'mid the foes. 
No longer Blount the view could bear : 
*' By Heaven, and all its saints ! I swear 



486 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

I will not see it lost ! 
Fitz-Eustace, yoii with Lady Clare 
May bid your beads, and patter prayer, — 

I gallop to tbe host." 
And to the fray he rode amain, 
Followed by all the archer train. 
The fiery youth, with desperate charge, 
Made, for a space, an opening large, — 

The rescued banner rose ; — 
But darkly closed the war around ; 
Like pine-tree, rooted from the ground, 

It sunk among the foes. 
Then Eustace mounted too, yet staid, 
As loth to leave the helpless maid, 

A¥hen, fast-as shaft can fly. 
Bloodshot his eyes, his nostrils spread, 
The loose rein dangling from his head, 

Housing and saddle bloody red, 

Lord Marmion's steed rushed by ; 
And Eustace, maddening at the sight, 
A look and sign to Clara cast, 
To mark he would return in haste, 

Then plunged into the fight. 

The war, that for a space did fail, 

Now trebly thundering swelled the gale, 

And Stanley ! was the cry : — 
A light on Marmion's visage spread, 

And fired his glazing eye : 
"With dying hand, above his head, 
He shook the fragment of his blade, 

And shouted " Victory !" — 
" Charge, Chester, charge ! On, Stanley, on !" 
V/ere the last words of Marmion. 

By this, though deep the evening fell. 
Still rose the battle's deadly swell ; 
For still the Scots, around their king. 
Unbroken, fought in desperate ring. 
Where's now their victor vaward vnng ? 
Where Huntley, and where Home ? 
0, for a blast of that dread horn. 
On Fontarabian echoes borne. 

That to King Charles did come, 
AVhen Koland brave, and Olivier, 
And every paladin and peer, 

On Eoncesvalles died ! 

Such blast might warn them, not in vain, 
To quit the plunder of the slain. 
And turn the doubtful day again. 



SCOTT. 487 

While yet on Flodden side, 
Afar, the Royal standard flies. 
And round it toils, and bleeds, and dies 

Our Caledonian pride ! 
In vain the wish — for far away, 
While spoil and havoc mark their way, 
Near Sybil's Cross the plunderers stray. — 
" lady," cried the Monk, " away !" 

And placed her on her steed, 
And led her to the chapel fair 

Of Tilmouth upon Tweed. 

But, as they left the darkening heath, 
More desperate grew the strife of death. 
The English shafts in volleys hailed ; 
In headlong charge their horse assailed ; 
Front, flank, and rear the squadrons sweep 
To break the Scottish circle deep, 

That fought around their king : 
But yet, though thick the shafts as snow, 
Though charging knights like whirlwinds go, 
Though billmen ply the ghastly blow. 

Unbroken was the ring ; 
The stubborn spearmen still made good 
Their dark impenetrable wood, 
Each stepping where his comrade stood 

The instant that he fell. 
No thought was there of dastard fhght ; 
Linked in the serried phalanx tight, 
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight. 

As fearlessly and well ; 
Till utter darkness closed her wing 
O'er their thin host and wounded king. 
Then skilful Surrey's sage commands 
Led back from strife his shattered bands ; 

And from the charge they drew. 
As mountain waves from wasted lands 

Sweep back to ocean blue. 
Then did their loss his foemen know ; 
Their king, their lords, their mightiest low, 
They melted from the field as snow. 
When streams are swollen and south winds blow, 

Dissolves in silent dew. 

Tweed's echoes heard the ceaseless plash, 

While many a broken band, 
Disordered, through her currents dash. 

To gain the Scottish land ; 
To town and tower, to down and dale, 
To tell red Flodden's dismal tale. 



488 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

And raise tlie universal wail. 
Tradition, legend, tune, and song 
Shall many an age that wail prolong : 
Still from the sire the son shall hear 
Of the stern strife, and carnage drear, 

Of Flodden's fatal field, 
Where shivered was fair Scotland's spear, 

And broken was her shield ! 

Scott, born in 1771, died in 1832. 



Crabbe; Campbell; Moore. 

Crabbe, Campbell, and Moore, were all known as poetical 
writers previous to the breaking forth of Scott's bright day: 
Crabbe had published Ms first poem, The Library, so far back as in 
1781, The Village in 1783, and The Newspaper in 1785; Camp- 
bell, his Pleasures of Hope in 1799 ; Moore, his Anacreon in 
1800. But Campbell alone had before that epoch attracted any 
considerable share of the public attention ; and even he, after 
following up his first long poem with his Hohenlinden, his Battle 
of the Baltic, his Mariners of England, and a few other short 
pieces, had laid aside his lyre for some five or six years. Neither 
Crabbe nor Moore had as yet produced anything that gave pro- 
mise of the high station they v/ere to attain in our poetical lite- 
rature, or had even acquired any general notoriety as writers of 
verse. No one of the three, however, can be said to have caught 
any part of his manner from Scott. Campbell's first poem, 
juvenile as its execution in some respects was, evinced in its 
glowing impetuosity and imposing splendour of declamation the 
genius of a true and original poet, and the same general character 
that distinguishes his poetry in its maturest form, which may 
be described as a combination of fire and elegance ; and his early 
lyrics, at least in their general effect, are not excelled by any' 
thing he subsequently wrote, although the tendency of his style 
towards greater purity and simplicity was very marked in all his 
later compositions. It was with a narrative poem — his Pennsyl- 
vanian Tale of Gertrude of Wyoming — that Campbell (in 1809) 
returned to woo the public favour, after Scott had made poetry, 
and that particular form of it, so popular ; and, continuing to obey 
the direction which had been given to the public taste, he after- 
wards produced his exquisite O'Connor's Child and his Theodric ; 
the former the most passionate, the latter the purest, of all his 
longer poems. Crabbe, in like manner, when he at last, in 1807, 
broke his silence of twenty years, came forth with a volume, all 



CRABBE ; CAMPBELL ; MOORE. 489 

tliat was new in wliich consisted of narrative poetry, and lie 
never afterwards attempted any other style. Narrative, indeed, 
had formed the happiest and most characteristic portions of 
Crabbe's former compositions ; and he was probably led now to 
resume his pen mainly by the turn which the taste and fashion 
of the time had taken in favour of the kind of poetry to which 
his genius most strongly carried him. His narrative manner, 
however, it is scarcely necessary to observe, has no resemblance 
either to that of Scott or to that of Campbell. Crabbe's poetry, 
indeed, both in its form and in its spirit, is of quite a peculiar 
and original character. It might be called the poetry of matter- 
of-fact, for it is as true as any prose, and, except the rhyme, has 
often little about it of the ordinary dress of poetry ; but the effect 
of poetry, nevertheless, is always there in great force, its power 
both of stirring the affections and presenting vivid pictures to the 
fancy. Other poets may be said to exalt the truth to a heat 
naturally foreign to it in the crucible of their imagination ; he, 
by a subtler chemistry, draws forth from it its latent heat, making 
even things that look the coldest and deadest sparkle and flash 
with passion. It is remarkable, however, in how great a degree, 
with all its originality, the poetical genius of Crabbe was acted 
upon and changed by the growth of new tastes and a new spirit 
in the times through which he lived, — how his poetry took a 
warmer temperament, a richer colour, as the age became more 
poetical. As he lived, indeed, in two eras, so he wrote in two 
styles : the first, a sort of imitation, as we have already observed, 
of the rude vigour of Churchill, though marked from the begin- 
ning by a very distinguishing quaintness and raciness of its own, 
but comparatively cautious and commonplace, and dealing rather 
with the surface than with the heart of things ; the last, with all 
the old peculiarities retained, and perhaps exaggerated, but 
greatly more copious, daring, and impetuous, and infinitely 
improved in penetration and general effectiveness. And his 
poetical power, nourished by an observant spirit and a thought- 
ful tenderness of nature, continued to grow in strength to the 
end of his life ; so that the last poetry he published, his Tales of 
the Hall, is the finest he ever wrote, the deepest and most 
passionate in feeling as well as the happiest in execution. In 
Crabbe's sunniest passages, however, the glow is still that of a 
melancholy sunshine : compared to what we find in Moore's 
poetry, it is like the departing flush from the west, contrasted 
with the radiance of morning poured out plentifully over earth 
and sky, and making all things laugh in light. Earely has there 
been seen so gay, nimble, airy a wonder-worker in verse as 



490 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Moore; rarely such a conjuror with words, which he makes to 
serve rather as wings for his thoughts than as the gross attire or 
embodiment with which they must be encumbered to render them 
palpable or visible. His wit is not only the sharpest and 
brightest to be almost anywhere found, but is produced apparently 
with more of natural facility, and shapes itself into expression 
more spontaneously, than that of any other poet. But there is 
almost as much humour as wit in Moore's gaiety ; nor are his wit 
and humour together more than a small part of his poetry, which, 
preserving in all its forms the same matchless brilliancy, finish, 
and apparent ease and fluency, breathes in its tenderer strains 
the very soul of sweetness and pathos. Moore, after having risen 
to the ascendant in his proper region of the poetical firmament, 
at last followed the rest into the walk of narrative poetry, and 
produced his Lalla Eookh (1817) : it is a poem, with all its 
defects, abounding in passages of great beauty and splendour ; 
but his Songs are, after all, probably, the compositions for which 
he will be best remembered. 

No poetry of this time is probably so deeply and universally 
written upon the popular heai"t and memory as Campbell's great 
Ija'ics ; these, therefore, it is needless to give here ; some things 
that he has written in another style will have a greater chance 
of being less familiar to the reader. With all his classic 
taste and careful finish, Campbell's writing, especially in his 
earlier poetry, is rarely altogether free for any considerable 
number of lines from something hollow and false in expression, 
into which he was seduced by the conventional habits of the pre- 
ceding bad school of verse-making in which he had been partly 
trained, and from which he emerged, or by the gratification of his 
ear lulling his other faculties asleep for the moment ; even in his 
Battle of the Baltic, for instance, what can be worse than the 
two lines — 

But the might of England flushed 

To anticipate the scene ? 

And a similar use of fine words with little or no meaning, or with 
a meaning which can only be forced out of them by torture, is 
occasional in all his early compositions. In the Pleasures of 
Hope, especially, s^vell of sound without any proportionate 
quantity of sense, is of such frequent occurrence as to be almost 
a characteristic of the poem. All his later poetry, however, is of 
much purer execution ; and some of it is of exquisite delicacy 
and grace of form. A little incident was never, for example, 
more perfectly told than in the following verses : — 



CAMPBELL. 49J 

The ordeal's fatal trumpet sounded, 

And sad pale Adelgitha came. 
When forth a valiant champion bounded, 

And slew the slanderer of her fame. 

She wept, delivered from her danger ; 

But, when he knelt to claim her glove— 
" Seek not," she cried, " oh ! gallant stranger, 

For hajDless Adelgitha's love. 

" For he is in a foreign far land 

Whose arm should now have set me free ; 

And I must wear the willow garland 
For him that's dead or false to me." 

*' Nay ! say not that his faith is tainted !'" 

He raised his vizor — at the sight 
She fell into his arms and fainted ; 

It was indeed her own true knight. 

Equally perfect, in a higher, more earnest style, is the letter 
to her absent husband, dictated and signed by Constance in her 
last moments, which closes the tale of Theodric : — 

" Theodric, this is destiny above 
Our power to baffle ; bear it then, my love ! 
Eave not to learn the usage I have borne, 
For one true sister left me not forlorn ; 
And, though you 're absent in another land, 
Sent from me by my o^rti well-meant command, 
Tour soul, I know, as firm is knit to mine 
As these clasped hands in blessing you now join : 
Shape not imagined horrors in my fate — 
Even now my sufferings are not very great ; 
And, when your grief's first transports shall subside, 
I call upon your strength of soul and pride 
To pay my memory, if 'tis worth the debt, 
Love's glorying tribute — not forlorn regret : 
I charge my name with power to conjure up 
Eeflection's balmy, not its bitter, cup. 
My pardoning angel, at the gates of heaven, 
Shall look not more regard than you have given 
To me ; and our life's union has been clad 
In smiles of bhss as sweet as life e'er had. 
Shall gloom be from such bright remembrance cast ? 
Shall bitterness outflow from sweetness past ? 
No ! imaged in the sanctuary of your breast. 
There let me smile, amidst high thoughts at rest ; 
And let contentment on your spirit shine, 
As if its peace were still a part of mine : 
For, if you war not proudly with your pain, 
For you I shall have worse than lived in vain. 



492 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

But I conjure your manliness to bear 

My loss with noble spirit — not despair ; 

I ask you by our love to promise this, 

And kiss these words, where I have left a kiss, — 

The latest from my living lips for yours." 

Words that will solace him while life endures : 
For, though his spirit from affliction's surge 
Could ne'er to life, as life had been, emerge, 
Yet still that mind, whose harmony elate 
Eang sweetness even beneath the crush of fate, — 
That mind in whose regard all things were placed 
In views that softened them, or hght that graced, — 
That soul's example could not but dispense 
A portion of its own blest influence ; 
Invoking him to peace and that self-sway 
Which fortune cannot give, nor take away ; 
And, though he mourned her long, 'twas with such woe 
As if her spirit watched him still below. 

It is difficult to find a single passage, not too long for quota- 
tion, which will convey any tolerable notion of the power and 
beauty of Crabbe's poetry, where so much of the effect lies in the 
conduct of the narrative — in the minute and prolonged but won- 
derfully skilful as well as truthful pursuit and exposition of the 
course and vicissitude of passions and circumstances ; but we will 
give so much of the story of the Elder Brother, in the Tales of 
the Hall, as will at least make the catastrophe intelligible. We 
select this tale, among other reasons, for its containing one of 
those pre-eminently beautiful lyric bursts which seem to contrast 
so strangely with the general spirit and manner of Crabbe's 
poetry. After many years, the narrator, pursuing another 
inquiry, accidentally discovers the lost object of his heart's 
passionate but pure idolatry living in infamy : — 

Will you not ask, how I beheld that face, 
Or read that mind, and read it in that place 1 
I have tried, Kichard, ofttimes, and in vain, 
To trace my thoughts, and to review their train — 
If train there were— that meadow, grove, and stile, 
The fright, the escape, her sweetness, and her smile ; 
Years since elapsed, and hope, from year to year, 
To find her free — and then to find her here ! 

But is it she ? — ! yes ; the rose is dead, 
All beauty, fragrance, freshness, glory, fled ; 
But yet 'tis she — the same and not the same — 
Who to my bower a heavenly being came ; 
Who waked my soul's first thought of real bliss, 
Whom long I sought, and now I find her — this. 



CRABBE. 493 

I cannot paint her — something I had seen 
So pale and slim, and tawdry and unclean ; 
With haggard looks, of vice and woe the prey, 
Laughing in languor, miserably gay : 
Her face, where face appeared, was amply spread, 
By art's warm pencil, with ill-chosen red, 
The flower's fictitious bloom, the bhishing of the dead : 
But still the features were the same, and strange 
My view of both — the sameness and the change, 
That fixed me gazing, and my eye enchained, 
Although so little of herself remained ; 
It is the creature whom I loved, and yet 
Is far unlike her — would I could forget 
The angel or her fall ; the once adored 
Or now despised ! the worshipped or deplored ! 
" O ! Eosabella !" I prepared to say, 
" Whom I have loved ;" but Prudence whispered. Nay, 
And Folly grew ashamed — Discretion had her day. 
She gave her hand ; which, as I lightly pressed, 
The cold but ardent grasp my soul oppressed ; 
The ruined girl disturbed me, and my eyes 
Looked, I conceive, both sorrow and surprise. 



If words had failed, a look explained their style ; 
She could not blush assent, but she could smile : 
Good heaven ! I thought, have I rejected fame. 
Credit, and wealth, for one who smiles at shatne ? 

She saw me thoughtful — saw it, as I guessed. 
With some concern, though nothing she expressed. 
" Come, my dear friend, discard that look of care," & 

Thus spoke the siren in voluptuous style. 
While I stood gazing and perplexed the while, 
Chained by that voice, confounded by that smile. 
And then she sang, and changed from grave to gay, 
Till all reproach and anger died away. 



" My Damon was the first to w^ake 

The gentle flame that cannot die ; 
My Damon is the last to take 

The faithful bosom's softest sigh : 
The life between is nothing worth, 

! cast it from thy thought away ; 
Think of the day that gave it birth. 

And this its sweet returning day. 

** Buried be all that has been done. 
Or say that nought is done amiss ; 



494. ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

For who the dangerous path can shun 
In such bewildering world as this ? 

But love can every fault forgive, 
Or with a tender look reprove ; 

And now let nought in memory live, 
But that we meet, and that we love." 



And then she moved my pity ; for she wept, 
And told her miseries, till resentment slept ; 
For, when she saw she could not reason blind, 
She poured her heart's whole sorrows on my mind, 
With features graven on my soul, with sighs 
Seen, but not heard, with soft imploring eyes, 
And voice that needed not, but had, the aid 
Of powerful words to soften and persuade. 
" ! I repent me of the past ;" &c. 

Softened, I said, " Be mine the hand and heart, 
If with your world you will consent to part," 
She would — she tried. — Alas ! she did not know 
How deeply-rooted evil habits grow : 
She felt the truth upon her spirits press. 
But wanted ease, indulgence, show, excess, 
Voluptuous banquets, pleasures — not refined, 
But such as soothe to sleep the opposing mind — 
She looked for idle vice, the time to kill, 
And subtle, strong apologies for ill. 
And thus her yielding, unresisting soul 
Sank, and let sin confuse her and control : 
Pleasures that brought disgust yet brought relief, 
And minds she hated helped to war with grief. 

I had long lost her ; but I sought in vain 
To banish pity ; — still she gave me pain. 

There came at length request 

That I would see a wretch with grief oppressed, 
By guilt affrighted — and I went to trace 
Once more the vice-worn features of that face. 
That sin- wrecked being ! and I saw her laid 
Where never worldly joy a visit paid ; 
That world receding fast ! the world to come 
Concealed in terror, ignorance, and gloom ; 
Sin, sorrow, and neglect ; with not a spark 
Of vital hope, — all horrible and dark. — 
It frightened me ! — I thought, and shall not I 
Thus feel ? — thus fear ? — this danger can 1 fly ? 
Do I so wisely live that I can calmly die ? 



MOORE. 495 

Still as I went came other change — the frame 
And featm-es wasted, and yet slowly came 
The end ; and so inaudible the breath, 
And still the breathing, we exclaimed — 'Tis death ! 
But death it was not ; when indeed she died 
T sat and his last gentle stroke espied : 
When — as it came — or did my fancy trace 
That lively, lovely flushing o'er the face ? 
Bringing back all that my young heart impressed ! 
It came — and went ! — She sighed, and was at rest ! 

From Moore, whose works are more, probably, than those of any 
of his contemporaries in the hands of all readers of poetry, we will 
make only one short extract. Here is the exquisitely beautiful 
description in the Fire Worshippers, the finest of the four tales 
composing Lalla Eookh, of the calm after a storm, in which the 
heroine, the gentle Hinda, awakens in the war-bark of her lover 
Hafed, the noble Gheber chief, into which she had been trans- 
ferred from her own galley while she had swooned with terror 
from the tempest and the fight : — 

How calm, how beautiful comes on 
The stilly hour when storms are gone ! 
When warring winds have died away. 
And clouds, beneath the dancing ray, 
Melt off, and leave the land and sea 
Sleeping in bright tranquillity — - 
Fresh as if day again were born, 
Again upon the lap of morn ! 
When the light blossoms, rudely torn 
And scattered at the whirlwind's will, 
Hang floating in the pure air still. 
Filling it all with precious balm, 
In gratitude for this sweet calm : — 
And every drop the thunder-showers 
Have left upon the grass and floT\^ers 
Sparkles, as 'twere that lightning gem 
Whose liquid flame is bom of them ! 

AVhen, 'stead of one unchanging breeze, 
There blow a thousand gentle airs, 
And each a different perfume bears, — 

As if the loveliest plants and trees 
Had vassal breezes of their own, 
To watch and wait on them alone, 
And waft no other breath than theirs ! 
When the blue waters rise and fall, 
In sleepy sunshine mantling all ; 
And even that swell the tempest leaves 
Is like the full and silent heaves 



496 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Of lovers' hearts when newly blest — 
Too newly to be quite at rest ! 
Such was the golden hour that broke 
UXDon the world, when Hinda woke 
From her long ti-ance, and heard around 
No motion but the water's sound 
Eippling against the vessel's side, 
As slow it mounted o'er the tide. — 
But where is she 1 — her eyes are dark. 
Are wildered still — is this the bark, 
The same that from Haimozia's bay 
Bore her at morn — whose bloody way 
The sea-dog tracks ? — No ! strange and new 
Is all that meets her wondering view 
Upon a galliot's deck she lies, 

Beneath no rich pavilion's shade, 
No plumes to fan her sleeping eyes, 

Nor jasmin on her pillow laid. 
But the rude litter, roughly spread 
With war-cloaks, is her homely bed, 
And shawl and sash, on javelins hung, 
For awning o'er her head are flung. 
Shuddering she looked around — there lay 

A group of warriors in the sun 
Eesting their limbs, as for that day 
Their ministry of death were done : 
Some gazing on the drowsy sea, 
Lost in unconscious reverie ; 
And some, who seemed but ill to brook 
That sluggish calm, with many a look 
To the slack sail impatient cast, 
As loose it flagged, before the mast. 

Crabbe, bom in 1754, lived till 1832 ; Campbell, born in 1777, 
died in 1844; Moore, bom in 1780, died in 1851. 



Byron. 

Byron was the writer whose blaze of popularity it mainly was 
that threw Scott's name into the shade, and induced him to 
abandon verse. Yet the productions which had this effect — the 
Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, &c., published in 1813 
and 1814 (for the new idolatry was scarcely kindled by the two 
respectable, but somewhat tame, cantos of Childe Harold, in quite 
another style, which appeared shortly before these effusions), 



SHELLEY, 497 

were, in realit}', only poems written in wliat may be called a 
variation of Scott's own manner — Oriental lays and romances, 
Turkish Marmions and Ladies of the Lake. The novelty of 
scene and subject, the exaggerated tone of passion in the out- 
landish tales, and a certain trickery in the writing (for it will 
hardly now be called anything else), materially aided by the 
mysterious interest attaching to the personal history of the noble 
bard, who, whether he sung of Giaours, or Corsairs, or Laras, 
was always popularly believed to be " himself the great sublime 
he drew," wonderfully excited and intoxicated the public mind 
at first, and for a time made all other poetry seem spiritless and 
wearisome ; but, if Byron had adhered to the style by which his 
fame was thus originally made, it probably would have proved 
transient enough. Few will now be found to assert that there 
is anything in these earlier poems of his comparable to the great 
passages in those of Scott — to the battle in Marmion, for instance, 
or the raising of the clansmen by the fiery cross in the Lady of 
the Lake, or msaij others that might be mentioned. But Byron's 
vigorous and elastic genius, although it had already tried various 
styles of poetry, was, in truth, as yet only preluding to its proper 
display. First, there had been the very small note of the Hours 
of Idleness ; then, the sharper, but not more original or much 
more promising, strain of the English Bards and Scotch 
Eeviewers (a satirical attempt in all respects inferior to Gifibrd's 
Baviad and Mseviad, of which it was a slavish imitation) ; next, 
the certainly far higher and more matured, but still quiet and 
commonplace, manner of the first two cantos of Childe Harold ; 
after that, suddenly the false glare and preternatural vehemence 
of these Oriental rhapsodies, which yet, however, with all their 
hollowness and extravagance, evinced infinitely more power than 
anything he had previously done, or rather were the only poetry 
he had yet produced that gave proof of any remarkable poetic 
genius. The Prisoner of Chillon and Parisina, The Siege of 
Corinth and Mazeppa, followed, all in a spirit of far more truth, 
and depth, and beauty than the other tales that had preceded 
them ; but the highest forms of Byron's poetry must be sought 
for in the two concluding cantos of Childe Harold, and in what 
else he wrote in the last seven or eight years of his short life. 



Shelley. 

Yet the greatest poetical genius of this time, if it was not that 
of Coleridge, was, probably, that of Shelley. Byron died in 

2k 



498 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

1824, at the age of thirty-six; Shelley in 1822, at that of 
twenty-nine. What Shelley pi'oduced during the brief term 
allotted to him on earth, much of it passed in sickness and 
sorrow, is remarkable for its quantity, but much more wonderful 
for the quality of the greater part of it. His Queen Mab, 
written when he was eighteen, crude and defective as it is, and 
unworthy to be classed with what he wrote in his maturer j^ears, 
was probably the richest promise that was ever given at so early 
an age of poetic power, the fullest assurance that the writer was 
born a poet. From the date of his Alastor, or The Spirit of 
Solitude, the earliest written of the poems published by himself, 
to his death, was not quite seven years. The Eevolt of Islam, 
in twelve cantos, or books, the dramas of Prometheus Unbound, 
The Cenci, and Hellas, the tale of Eosalind and Helen, The 
Masque of Anarchy, The Sensitive Plant, Julian and Maddalo, 
The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion, Adonais, The Triumph of 
Life, the translations of Homer's Hymn to Mercury, of the 
Cyclops of Euripides, and of the scenes from Calderon and 
from Goethe's Faust, besides many short poems, were the addi- 
tional produce of this springtime of a life destined to know no 
summer. So much poetry, so rich in various beauty, was pro- 
bably never poured forth with so rapid a flow from any other 
mind. Nor can much of it be charged with either immaturity 
or carelessness: Shelley, with all his abundance and facility, 
was a fastidious writer, scrupulously attentive to the effect of 
words and syllables, and accustomed to elaborate whatever he 
wrote to the utmost ; and, although it is not to be doubted that 
if he had lived longer he would have developed new powers and 
a still more masterly command over the several resources of his 
art, anything that can properly be called unripeness in his 
composition had, if not before, ceased with his Eevolt of Islam, 
the first of his poems which he gave to the w^orld, as if the 
exposure to the public eye had burned it out. Some haziness 
of thought and uncertainty of expression may be found in some 
of his later, or even latest, works ; but that is not to be con- 
founded with rawness ; it is the dreamy ecstasy, too high for 
speech, in which his poetical nature, most subtle, sensitive, and 
voluptuous, delighted to dissolve and lose itself. Yet it is 
marvellous how far he had succeeded in reconciling even this 
mood of thought with the necessities of distinct expression : 
witness his Epipsychidion (written in the last year of his life), 
which may be regarded as his crowning triumph in that kind of 
writing, and as, indeed, for its wealth and fusion of all the 
highest things — of imagination, of expression, of music, — one 



SHELLEY. 499 

of the greatest miracles ever wrought in poetry. In other styles, 
again, all widely diverse, are the Cenci, the Masque of Anarchy, 
the Hymn to Mercury (formally a translation, but essentially 
almost as much an original composition as any of the others). 
It is hard to conjecture what would have been impossible to him 
by whom all this had been done. 

It will suffice to give one of the most brilliant and charac- 
teristic of Shelley's shorter poems — his Ode, or Hymn, as it may 
be called. To a Skylark, written in 1820 : — 

Hail to thee, blithe spirit, 

Bird thou never wert. 
That from heaven, or near it, 

Pourest thy full heart 
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 

Higher still and higher 

From the earth thou springest ; 
Ijike a cloud of fire 

The blue deep thou wingest. 
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 

In the golden lightning 

Of the sunken sun, 
O'er which clouds are brightening. 

Thou dost float and run ; 
Like an embodied Joy whose race is just begun. 

The pale purple even 

Melts around thy flight ; 
Like a star of heaven 

In the broad daylight. 
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, 

Keen as are the arrows 
Of that silver sphere. 
Whose intense lamp narrows 
In the white dawn clear, 
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. 

All the earth and air 

With thy voice is loud, 
As, when night is bare. 

From one lonely cloud 
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. 

What thou art we know not : 

What is most like thee 1 
From rainbow clouds there flow not 

Drops so bright to see 
As from thy pi'esence showers a rain of melody. 



500 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Like a poet hidden 

In the light of thought, 
Singing hymns unbidden, 

Till the world is wrought 
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not : 

Like a highborn maiden 

In a palace tower, 
Soothing her love-laden 

Soul in secret hour 
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower ' 

Like a glow-worm golden 

In a dell of dew, 
Scattering unbeholden 

Its aerial hue 
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view : 

Like a rose embowered 

In its own green leaves, 
By warm winds deflowered, 

Till the scent it gives 
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves : 

Sound of vernal showers 

On the twinkling grass, 
Eain-awakened flowers, 

All that ever was 
Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass. 

Teach us, sprite or bird, 

What sweet thoughts are thine : 
I have never heard 

Praise of love or wine 
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. 

Chorus hymeneal, 

Or triumphal chant, 
Matched with thine would be all 
But an empty vaunt — 
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 

What objects are the fountains 

Of thy happy strain ? 
What fields, or waves, or mountains ? 

What shapes of sky or plain ? 
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain ? 

With thy clear keen joyance 

Languor cannot be : 
Shadow of annoyance 

Never came near thee : 
Thou lovest ; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. 



KEATS. 501 

Waking or asleep, 

Thou of death, must deem 
Things more true and deep 

Than we mortals dream, 
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream ? 

We look before and after, 

And pine for what is not ; 
Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught ; 
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 

Yet if we could scorn 

Hate, and pride, and fear ; 
If we were things born 

Not to shed a tear, 
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. 

Better than all measures 

Of delightful sound. 
Better than all treasures 

That in books are found, 
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground ! 

Teach me half the gladness 

That thy brain must know, 
Such harmonious madness 

From my lips would flow, 
The world should listen then, as I am listening now. 



Keats. 

Keats, bom in 1796, died the year before Slielley, and, of 
course, at a still earlier age. But his poetry is younger than 
Shelley's in a degree far beyond the difference of their years. 
He was richly endowed by nature with the poetical faculty, and 
all that he has written is stamped with originality and power ; 
it is probable, too, that lie would soon have supplied, as far as 
was necessary or important, the defects of his education, as 
indeed he had actually done to a considerable extent, for he was 
full of ambition as well as genius ; but he can scarcely be said 
to have given full assurance by anything he has left that he 
would in time have produced a great poetical work. The charac- 
ter of his mental constitution, explosive and volcanic, was adverse 
to every kind of restraint and cultivation ; and his poetry is a 
tangled forest, beautiful indeed and glorious with many a majestic 
oak and sunny glade, but still with the unpruned, untrained 
savagery everywhere, constituting, apparently, so much of its 
essential character as to be inseparable from it, and indestructible 



502 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

withont tlie ruin at the same time of everything else. There is 
not only the absence of art, but a spirit antagonistic to that of 
art. Yet this wildness and turbulence may, after all, have been 
only an affluence of true power too great to be soon or easily 
brought under regulation, — the rankness of a tropic vegetation, 
coming of too rich a soil and too much light and heat. Cer- 
tainly to no one of his contemporaries had been given more of 
passionate intensity of conception (the life of poetry) than to 
Keats. Whatever he thought or felt came to him in vision, and 
wrapped and thrilled him. Whatever he wrote burns and 
blazes. And his most wanton extravagances had for the most 
part a soul of good in them. His very affectations were mostly 
prompted by excess of love and reverence. In his admiration 
and worship of our Elizabethan poetrj^ he was not satisfied 
without mimicking the obsolete syllabication of the language 
w^hich he found there enshrined, and, as he conceived, con- 
secrated. Even the most remarkable of all the peculiarities of 
his manner — the extent, altogether, we should think, without a 
parallel in our literature, to which he surrenders himself in 
writing to the guidance of the mere wave of sound upon which 
he happens to have got afloat, often, one would almost say, 
making ostentation of his acquiescence and passiveness — is a 
fault only in its excess, and such a fault, moreover, as only a 
true poet could run into. Sound is of the very essence of song ; 
and the music must always in so far guide the movement of the 
verse, as truly as it does that of the dance. It only is not the 
all in all. If the musical form be the mother of the verse, the 
sense to be expressed is the father. Yet Keats, by what he has 
thus produced in blind obedience to the tune that had taken 
possession of him — allowing the course of the composition to be 
directed simply by the rhyme sometimes for whole pages — has 
shown the same sensibility to the musical element in poetry, and 
even something of the same power of moulding language to his 
will, which we find in all our greatest poets — in Spenser espe- 
cially, whose poetry is ever as rich with the charm of music as 
with that of picture, and who makes us feel in so many a vic- 
torious stanza that there is nothing his wonder-working mastery 
over words cannot make them do for him. Keats's Endy- 
ipaion was published in 1817 ; his Lamia,* Isabella, Eve of St. 

* " If any one," Leigh Hunt has said, " could unite the vigour of Dryden 
with the ready and easy variety of pause in the works of the late Mr. Crabbe 
and the lovely poetic consciousness in the Lamia of Keats, in which the lines 
seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty, like sea-nymphs 
luxuriating through the water, he would be a perfect master of rhyming heroic 
verse." 



KEATS. 503 

Agnes, and the remarkable fragment, Hyperion, together in 
1820, a few months before his death. The latter volume also 
contained several shorter pieces, one of which, of great beauty, 
the Ode to a Nightingale, may serve as a companion to Shelley's 
Skylark :— 

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, 
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains 

One minute past, and Lethe- ward had sunk : 
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 

But being too happy in thine happiness, — 
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, 

In some melodious plot 
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, 
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 

for a draught of vintage that hath been 

Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, 
Tasting of Flora and the country green, 

Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth ! 
for a beaker full of the warm South, 

Full of the true, the blissful Hippocrene, 

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 
And purple-stained mouth ; 

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, 

And with thee fade away into the forest dim : 

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget 

What thou among the leaves hast never known. 
The weariness, the fever, and the fret 

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan ; 
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs ; 

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies ; 

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
And leaden-eyed despairs ; 

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. 

Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 

Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee. 

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, 
But on the viewless wings of Poesy, 

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards ! 
Already with thee ! Tender is the night, 

And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne, 

Clustered around by all her starry fays ; 
But here there is no light 

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown 

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 



504 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the houghs, 

But in emhalmed darkness guess each sweet 
Wherewith the seasonable month endows 

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild ; 
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine ; 
Fast-fading violets, covered up in leaves ; 

And mid-day's eldest child. 
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 

Darkhng I listen, and, for many a time, 

I have been half in love with easeful Death, ^ 

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, 
To take into the air my quiet breath ; 

Now more than ever seems it rich to die. 
To seize upon the midnight with no pain. 
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad 

In such an ecstasy ! 
Still would'st thou sing, and I have ears in vain — 
To thy high requiem become a sod. 

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird ! 
No hungry generations tread thee down ; 

The voice I hear this passing night was heard 
In ancient days by emperor and clown ; 

Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path 

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home 
She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; 

The same that oft-times hath 
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 

Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell 

To toll me back from thee to my soul's self! 

Adieu ! the fancy cannot cheat so well 
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. 

Adieu ! adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades 
Past the near meadows, over the still stream, 
Up the hill-side ; and now 'tis buried deep 

In the next valley-glades : 
Was it a vision, or a waking dream ? 
Fled is that music : — do I wake or sleep .? 



1 Shelley had probably this line in .his ear, when in the Preface to his 
Adonais, which is an elegy on Keats, he wrote — describing " the romantic and 
lonely cemetery of the Protestants " at Rome, where his friend was buried — 
*' The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with 
violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one 
should be buried in so sweet a place." 



505 



Hunt. 

These last names can hardly be mentioned without suggesting 
another — that of one who has only the other day been taken 
from ns. Leigh Hunt, the friend of Shelley and Keats, had 
attracted the attention of the world by much that he had done, 
both in verse and prose, long before the appearance of either. 
His Story of Rimini, published in 1816, being, as it was, in- 
disputably the finest inspiration of Italian song that had yet 
been heard in our modern English literature, had given him a 
place of his own as distinct as that of any other poetical writer 
of the day. Whatever may be thought of some peculiarities in 
his manner of writing, nobody will now be found to dispute 
either the originality of his genius, or his claim to the title of 
a true poet. Into whatever he has written he has put a living 
soul ; and much of what he has produced is brilliant either with 
wit and humour, or- with tenderness and beauty. In some of 
the best of his pieces too there is scarcely to be found a trace 
of anything illegitimate or doubtful in the matter of diction or 
versification. Where, for example, can we have more unex- 
ceptionable English than in the following noble version of the 
Eastern Tale ?— 

There came a man, making liis hasty moan, 

Before the Sultan Mahmoud on his throne, 

And crying out — " My sorrow is my right. 

And I will see the Sultan, and to-night." 

" Sorrow," said Mahmoud, " is a reverend thing ; 

I recognise its right, as king with king ; 

Speak on." " A fiend has got into my house," 

Exclaimed the staring man, " and tortures us ; 

One of thine officers — he comes, the abhorred, 

And takes possession of my house, my board, 

My bed : — I have two daughters and a wife, 

And the wild villain comes, and makes me mad with life." 

" Is he there now .?" said Mahmoud : — " No ; he left 

The house when I did, of my wits bereft ; 

And laughed me down the street, because I vowed 

I 'd bring the prince himself to lay him in his shroud. 

I 'm mad with want — I 'm mad with misery. 

And, oh thou Sultan Mahmoud, God cries out for thee !" 

The Sultan comforted the man, and said, 
" Go home, and I will send thee wine and bread" 
(For he was poor), " and other comforts. Go : 
And, should the Avretch return, let Sultan Mahmoud know." 



£00 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

In three days' time, witli haggard eyes and beard, 
And shaken voice, the suitor re-appeared, 
And said, " He 's come." — Mahmoud said not a word, 
But rose and took four slaves, each with a sword, 
And went with the vexed man. They reach the place, 
And hear a voice, and see a female face. 
That to the window fluttered in affright : 
*' Go in," said Mahmoud, " and put out the light ; 
But tell the females first to leave the room ; 
And, when the dnmkard follows them, we come." 

The man went in. There was a cry, and hark . 
A table falls, the window is struck dark : 
Forth rush the breathless women ; and behind 
With curses comes the fiend in desperate mind. 
In vain : the sabres soon cut short the strife. 
And chop the shrieking wretch, and drink his bloody life. 

" Now light the light," the Sultan cried aloud. 
'Twas done ; he took it in his hand, and bowed 
Over the corpse, and looked upon the face ; 
Then turned and knelt beside it in the place. 
And said a prayer, and from his lips there crept 
Some gentle words of pleasure, and he wept. 

In reverent silence the spectators wait. 
Then bring him at his call both wine and meat ; 
And when he had refreshed his noble heart, 
He bade his host be blest, and rose up to depart. 

The man amazed, all mildness now, and tears. 
Fell at the Sultan's feet, wdth many prayers. 
And begged him to vouchsafe to tell his slave 
The reason, first, of that command he gave 
About the light ; then, when he saw the face, 
Why he knelt down ; and lastly, how it was 
That fare so poor as his detained him in the X)laGe. 

The Sultan said, with much humanity, 
*' Since first I saw thee come, and heard thy cry, 
I could not rid me of a dread, that one 
By whom such daring villanies were done 
Must be some lord of mine, perhaps a lawless son. 
Whoe'er he was, I knew my task, but feared 
A father's heart, in case the worst appeared ; 
For this I had the light put out ; but when 
I saw the face, and found a stranger slain, 
I knelt, and thanked the sovereign arbiter, 
Whose work I had performed through pain and fear ; 
And then I rose, and was refreshed with food. 
The first time since thou cam'st, and marr'dst my solitude.' 



HUNT. 507 

Other short pieces in the same style are nearly as good — such 
as those entitled The Jaffar and The Inevitable. Then there 
are the admirable modernizations of Chaucer — of whom and of 
Spenser, whom he has also imitated with wonderful cleverness, 
no one of all his contemporaries probably had so true and deep 
a feeling as Hunt. But, passing over likewise his two greatest 
works, The Story of Eimini and The Legend of Florence (pub- 
lished in 1840), we will give one other short efiusion, which 
attests, we think, as powerfully as anything he ever produced, 
the master's triumphant hand, in a style which he has made his 
own, and in which, with however many imitators, he has no 
rival : — 

THE FANCY CONCEKT. 

They talked of their concerts, their singers, and scores, 

And pitied the fever that kept me in doors ; 

And I smiled in my thought, and said, " ye sweet fancies, 

And animal spirits, that still in your dances 

Come bringing me visions to comfort my care. 

Now fetch me a concert, — imparadise air." 

Then a wind, like a storm out of Eden, came pouring 

Fierce into my room, and made tremble the flooring. 

And filled, with a sudden impetuous trample 

Of heaven, its corners ; and swelled it to ample 

Dimensions to breathe in, and space for all power ; 

Which falling as suddenly, lo ! the sweet flower 

Of an exquisite fairy-voice opened its blessing ; 

And ever and aye, to its constant addressing. 

There came, falling in with it, each in the last. 

Flageolets one by one, and flutes blowing more fast, 

And hautboys and clarinets, acrid of reed, 

And the violin, smoothlier sustaining the speed 

As the rich tempest gathered, and buz-ringing moons 

Of tambours, and huge basses, and giant bassoons ; 

And the golden trombone, that darteth its tongue 

Like a bee of the gods ; nor was absent the gong. 

Like a sudden fate-bringing oracular sound 

Of earth's iron genius, burst up from the ground, 

A terrible slave come to wait on his masters 

The gods, with exultings that clanged like disastera ; 

And then spoke the organs, the very gods they, 

Like thunders that roll on a wind-blowing day ; 

And, taking the rule of the roar in their hands, 

Lo ! the Genii of Music came out of all lands ; 

And one of them said, " Will my lord tell his slave 

What concert 'twould please his Firesideship to have ?" 



508 ENGLISH LITERATUEE AND LANGUAGE. 

Then I said, in a tone of immense will and pleasm-e, 

" Let orchestras rise to some exquisite measure ; 

And let their be lights and be odours ; and let 

The lovers of music serenely be set ; 

And then, with their singers in lily-white stoles. 

And themselves clad in rose-colour, fetch me the souls 

Of all the composers accounted divinest. 

And, with their own hands, let them play me their finest." 

Then, lo ! was performed my immense will and pleasure, 

And orchestras rose to an exquisite measure ; 

And lights were about me and odours ; and set 

Were the lovers of music, all wondrously met ; 

And then, with their singers in lily-white stoles. 

And themselves clad in rose-colour, in came the souls 

Of all the composers accounted divinest. 

And, with their own hands, did they play me their finest. 

Oh ! truly was Italy heard then, and Germany, 

Melody's heart, and the rich brain of harmony ; 

Pure Paisiello, whose airs are as new 

Though we know them by heart, as May-blossoms and dew; 

And nature's twin son, Pergolesi ; and Bach, 

Old father of fugues, with his endless fine talk ; 

And Gluck, who saw gods ; and the learned sweet feeling 

Of Haydn ; and Winter, whose sorrows are healing ; 

And gentlest Corelli, whose bowing seems made 

For a hand with a jewel ; and Handel, arrayed 

In Oljonpian thunders, vast lord of the spheres, 

Yet pious himself, with his blindness in tears, 

A lover withal, and a conqueror, whose marches 

Bring demi-gods under victorious arches ; 

Then Ame, sweet and tricksome ; and masterly Purcell, 

Lay-clerical soul ; and Mozart universal. 

But chiefly with exquisite gallantries found. 

With a grove in the distance of holier sound ; 

Nor forgot was thy dulcitude, loving Sacchini ; 

Nor love, young and dying, in shape of Bellini ; 

Nor Weber, nor Himmel, nor Mirth's sweetest name, 

Cimarosa ; much less the great organ- voiced fame 

Of Marcello, that hushed the Venetian sea ; 

And strange was the shout, when it wept, hearing thee. 

Thou soul full of grace as of grief, my heart-cloven. 

My poor, my most rich, my all-feeling Beethoven. 

O'er all, like a passion, gi-eat Pasta was heard, 

As high as her heart, that truth-uttering bird ; 

And Banti was there ; and Grassini, that goddess ! 

Dark, deep-toned, large, lovely, with glorious boddice ; 

And Mara ; and Malibran, stung to the tips 

Of her fingers with pleasure ; and rich Fodor's lips 



HUNT. 509 

And, manly in face as in tone, Angrisani ; 

And Naldi, thy whim ; and thy grace, Tramezzani ; 

And was it a voice ? — or what was it ? — say — 

That, like a fallen angel beginning to pray, 

Was the soul of all tears and celestial despair ! 

Paganini it was, 'twixt his dark-flowing hair. 

So now we had instrument, now we had song — 

ISTow chorus, a thousand-voiced one-hearted throng ; 

Now pauses that pampered resumption, and now — 

But who shall describe what w-as played us, or how ? 

'Twas wonder, 'twas transport, humility, pride ; 

'Twas the heart of the mistress that sat by one's side ; 

'Twas the graces invisible, moulding the air 

Into all that is shapely, and lovely, and fair, 

And running our fancies their tenderest rounds 

Of endearments and luxuries, turned into sounds ; 

'Twas argument even , the logic of tones ; 

'Twas memory, 'twas wishes, 'twas laughters, 'twas moans ; 

'Twas pity and love, in pure impulse obeyed ; 

'Twas the breath of the stuff of which, passion is made. 

And these are the concerts I have at my will ; 

Then dismiss them, and patiently think of your " bill." — 

(Aside) Yet Lablache, after all, makes me long to go, still. 

Leigh Hunt died, at tlie age of seventy-five, in 1859, — the last 
survivor, although the earliest born, of the four poets, with the 
other three of whom he had been so intimately associated, and 
the living memory of whom he thus carried far into another 
time, indeed across an entire succeeding generation.* To the 
last, even in outward form, he forcibly recalled Shelley's fine 
picture of him in his Elegy on Keats, written nearly forty years 
before : — 

" What softer voice is hushed over the dead ? 

Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown ? 
What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed, 

In mockery of monumental stone. 
The heavy heart heaving without a moan ? 

If it be he, who, gentlest of the wise, 
Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one : 

Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs. 
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice." 



* Hunt— BjTon— Shelley— Keats, born in that order (in 1784, 1788, 1793, 
and 1796), died in exactly the reverse, and also at ages running in a series 
contraiy throughout to that of their births ; Keats, at 25, in 1821, — Shelley, 
at 29, in 1822,— Byron, at 36, in 1824, Hunt, at 75, in 1859. 



510 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Other Poetical Writers of the Earlier Part of the 
Nineteenth Century. 

The names that have been mentioned are the chief of those 
belonging, wholly or principally, to the earlier part of the pre- 
sent century, or to that remarkable literary era which maj be 
regarded as having expired with the reign of the last of the 
Georges. Many others, however, also brighten this age of our 
poetical literature, which cannot be here noticed. 

On the whole, this space of somewhat less than half a centur}^, 
dating from the first appearance of Cowper and Burns, must be 
pronounced to be the most memorable period in the history of 
our poetical literature after the age of Spenser and Shakespeare. 
And if, in comparing the produce of the two great revivals, the 
one happening at the transition from the sixteenth century into 
the seventeenth, the other at that from the eighteenth into 
the nineteenth, we find something more of freshness, freedom, 
raciness, and true vigour, warmth, and nature, in our earlier 
than in our recent poetry, it is not to be denied, on the other 
hand, that in some respects the latter may claim a preference 
over the former. It is much less debased by the intermixture of 
dross or alloy with its fine gold — much less disfigured by 
occasional pedantry and affectation — much more correct and free 
from flaws and incongruities of all kinds. In whatever regards 
form, indeed, our more modern poetry must be admitted, taken 
in its genetal character, to be the more perfect ; and that notwith- 
standing many passages to be found in the greatest of our elder 
poets which in mere writing have perhaps never since been 
equalled, nor are likely ever to be excelled ; and notwithstanding 
also something of greater boldness with which their position 
enabled them to handle the language, thereby attaining some- 
times a force and expressiveness not so much within the reach of 
their successors in our own day. The literary cultivation of the 
language throughout two additional centuries, and the stricter 
discipline under which it has been reduced, may have brought 
loss or inconvenience in one direction, as well as gain in another ; 
but the gain certainly preponderates. Even in the matter of 
versification, the lessons of Milton, of Dryden, and of Pope have 
no doubt been upon the whole instructive and beneficial ; what- 
ever of misdirection any of them may have given for a time to 
the form of our poetry passed away with his contemporaries and 
immediate followers, and now little or nothing but the good 
remains — the example of the superior care and uniform finish, 
and also something of sweetest and deepest music, as well as 



PROSE LITERATURE. 511 

mucli of spirit and brilliancy, that were unknown to our earlier 
poets. In variety and freedom, as well as in beauty, majesty, 
and ricliness of versification, some of our latest writers have 
hardly been excelled by any of their predecessors; and the 
versification of the generality of our modern poets is greatly 
superior to that of the common run of those of the age of Elizabeth 
and James. 



Prose Literature. 



Among the most distinguished ornaments of the prose litera- 
ture of this recent era were some of the chief poetical writers of 
the time. Southey and Scott were two of the most voluminous 
prose writers of their day, or of any day ; Coleridge also wrote 
much more prose than verse ; both Campbell and Moore are 
considerable authors in prose ; there are several prose pieces 
among the published works of Byron, of Shelley, and of Words- 
worth ; both Leigh Hunt and Wilson perhaps acquired more of 
their fame, and have given more wide- spread delight, as prose 
writers than as poets ; Charles Lamb's prose writings, his golden 
Essays of Elia, and various critical papers, abounding in original 
views and the deepest truth and beauty, have made his verse 
be nearly forgotten. Among the other most conspicuous prose 
writers of the period we have been reviewing may be men- 
tioned, in general literature and speculation, Sidney Smith, 
Hazlitt, Jeffrey, Playfair, Stewart, Alison, Thomas Brown ; in 
political disquisition, Erskine, Cobbett, Mackintosh, Bentham, 
Brougham (alone, of so many, still preserved to us, with his 
laurels won in every field of intellectual contest, both mentally 
and physically one of the most vital of the sons of men) ; 
in theological eloquence, Horsley, Wilberforce, Foster, Hall, 
Irving, Chalmers ; in history. Fox, Mitford, Lingard, James Mill, 
Hallam, Turner; in fictitious narrative, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. 
Opie, Miss Owenson (Lady Morgan), Mrs. Brunton, Miss 
Austen, Madame d'Arblay (Miss Burney), Godwin. Maturin. 
The most remarkable prose works that were produced were 
Scott's novels, the first of which, Waverley, appeared in 1814.* 
A powerful influence upon literature was also exerted from the 
first by the Edinburgh Eeview, begun in 1802 : the Quarterly 
Review, begun in 1809 ; and Blackwood's Magazine, established 
in 1817. 

* With the second title of 'Tis Sixty Years Since, the work professing (in 
the Introductory Chapter) to have been written, as it really was in part, nine 
years before. 



512 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Progress of Science. 

A few of the most memorable facts connected with the progress 
of scientific discovery in England, during this period, may be 
very briefly noted. In astronomy Herschel continued to pursue 
his observations, commenced a short time before 1781, in which 
year he discovered the planet Uranus ; in 1802, appeared in the 
Philosophical Transactions his catalogue of 500 new nebulie and 
nebulous stars ; in 1803 his announcement of the motions of 
double stars around each other ; and a long succession of other 
important papers, illustrative of the construction of the heavens, 
followed down to within a few years of his death, at the age of 
eighty- four, in 1822. In chemistry, Davy, who had published 
his account of the effects produced by the respiration of nitrous 
oxide (the laughing gas) in 1800, in 1807 extracted metallic 
bases from the fixed alkalis, in 1808 demonstrated the similar 
decomposability of the alkaline earths, in 1811 detected the true 
nature of chloride (oxymuriatic acid), and in 1815 invented his 
safety lamp; in 1804 Leslie published his Experimental Enquiry 
into the Nature and Properties of Heat; in 1808 the Atomic 
Theory was announced by Dalton ; and in 1814 its development 
and illustration were completed by WoUaston, to whom both 
chemical science and optics are also indebted for various other 
valuable services. 



513 



LITEEATURE OE THE PRESENT DAY. 

What is properly the History of our Literature closes with the 
age or generation preceding the present ; for history takes 
cognizance only of that which is past. What of literary pro- 
duction has taken place within the last thirty years, much or 
most of it by writers who are still alive, is hardly jei ripe for 
impartial appreciation. We may call this period the Victorian 
era. If we compare its poetical literature with that of the 
immediately preceding period of the same length, which will 
take us back to the beginning of the century, and may be called 
the last age of the Georges, confining ourselves to writers of 
established reputation, or whose names are universally more or 
less familiar, we shall find about the same number, between forty 
and fifty, in each ; but diiferently distributed in the two cases in 
respect of their degrees of eminence. While of those of the 
Georgian thirty years we may reckon about ten as belonging to 
the first rank, and about as many more as belonging to the 
second, leaving only twenty-five for the third, of the equal 
number belonging to the subsequent portion of the century we 
cannot account more than three, or at most- four, as being of the 
first rank, leaving, with again ten or eleven of the second, about 
thirty who must be assigned to the third or lowest. The 
difference, then, between the two periods will be, that in the 
poetical literature of the first we have ten -writers of the highest 
and only twenty-five who must be held to belong to the lowest 
of the three ranks, and that in that of the second we have only 
three or four of the highest with about thirty of the lowest. 
This enumeration takes account of the leading poetical writers 
who have arisen in the American division of the English race, 
two or three of whom ma}^ be reckoned as of the second rank, 
though certainly not one as of the first. 

In the prose literature of the two periods, however, we should 
probably find the above proportions more than reversed. The 
literary greatness of the Victorian age has hitheito manifested 
itself mostly in the works of our writers in prose. It is as if the 
one age were distinguished for its production of gold, the other 
for its production of silver. Probably in no other period, more- 
over, has there been seen so much activity of female genius and 
talent as we have had in the present, displaying itself princi- 

2 L 



514 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

pally, indeed, in fictitious narrative, but yet ranging, too, in 
several instances, above or beyond that. Of the writers in verse, 
however, who have attained any considerable distinction in the 
two periods, while about ten are women in the first, there are 
only five or six in the second. 

Yet it is a memorable distinction of the present age, and one 
which belongs to no other in any literatuie (unless, indeed, we 
are to except that in which Sappho flourished), that one of its 
greatest writers in verse is a woman. And, if we put aside the 
possible case of Sappho, of whom so little remains that, exquisite 
as that little is held to be by all who are best able to judge, we are 
left to estimate her in the main merely from her fame among her 
countrymen — which, however, resounds through all the after 
ages of Greece — probably Elizabeth Barrett (Mrs. Browning) is 
entitled to be regarded as the greatest woman poet that has yet 
appeared in any language. With whatever her poetry may be 
chargeable whether of defect or of excess — whatever it either 
wants which it should have, or has which it should not have — 
there are two vital elements, and they are the chief ingredients 
of the poetical, in which it is never wanting; — subtlety of 
imagination and force of conception and feeling. In not much 
modern verse shall we . find more of Greek intensity than in 
the following lines, entitled "A Child's Grave at Florence 
(A. A. E. C. ; born July, 1848 ; died November, 1849) " :— 

Of English blood, of Tuscan birth, 

What country should we give her ? 
Instead of any on the earth, 

The civic Heavens receive her. 

And here, among the English tombs, 

In Tuscan ground we lay her, 
While the blue Tuscan sky endomes 

Our English words of prayer. 

A little child ! — how long she lived 

By months, not years, is reckoned : 
Born in one July, she survived 

Alone to see a second. 

Bright-featured, as the July sun 

Her little face still played in, 
And splendours, with her birth begun. 

Had had no time for fading. 

So, Lilt, from those July hours, 

No wonder we should call her ; 
She looked such kinship to the flowers. 

Was but a little taller. 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 615 

A Tuscan lily, — only white, 

As Dante, in abhorrence 
Of red corruption, wished aright 

The lilies of his Florence.^ 
We could not wish her whiter, — her 

Who perfumed with pure blossom 
The house ! — a lovely thing to wear 

Upon a mother's bosom ! 
This July creature thought perhaps 

Our speech not worth assuming ; 
■ She sat upon her parents' laps. 

And mimicked the gnats humming ; 
Said " father," " mother,"— then left off, 

For tongues celestial fitter. 
Her hair had grown just long enough 

To catch heaven's jasper-glitter. 
Babes ! Love could always hear and see^ 

Behind the cloud that hid them. 
*' Let little children come to me, 

And do not thou forbid them.'' 

So, unforbidding, have we met. 

And gently here have laid her, 
Though winter is no time to get 

The flowers that should o'erspread her. 
We should bring pansies quick with spring, 

Rose, violet, daffodilly, 
And also, above everything, 

White lilies for our Lily. 
Nay, more than flowers this grave exacts, — 

Glad, graceful attestations 
Of her sweet eyes and pretty acts, 

With calm renunciations. 

Her very mother with light feet 

Should leave the place too earthy, 
Saying, " The angels have thee, Sweet, 

Because we are not worthy." 
But winter kills the orange buds. 

The gardens in the frost are, 
And all the heart dissolves in floods. 

Remembering we have lost her ! 
Poor earth, poor heart, — too weak, too weak, 

To miss the July shining ! 
Poor heart ! — what bitter words we speak ^ 

When God speaks of resigning ! 

1 The emphasis on the his ; and in the next line on the we and the her. 
' The always emphasised. 3 The-we emphatic. 



516 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

Sustain this heart in ns that faints, 

Thou God, the self-existent ! 
We catch up wild at parting saints, 

And feel thy heaven too distant. 

The wind that swept them out of sin 

Has ruffled all our vesture : 
On the shut door that let them in 

We beat with frantic gesture, — 

To us — us also — open straight ! 

The outer life is chilly — 
Are lue too, like the earth, to wait 

Till next year for our Lily ? 

— Oh, my own baby on my knees, 

My leaping, dimpled treasure, 
At every word 1 write like these 

Clasped close, with stronger pressure ! 

Too well my own heart understands, — 

At every word beats fuller — 
My little feet, my little hands,^ 

And hair of Lily's colour ! 

— But God gives patience, Love learns strength^ 
And Faith remembers promise, 

And Hope itself can smile at length 
On other hopes gone from us. 

Love, strong as Death, shall conquer Death, 
Through struggle made more glorious. 

This mother stills her sobbing breath, 
Eenouncing, yet victorious. 

Arms, empty of her child, she lifts. 

With spirit unbereaven, — 
" God will not all take back his gifts ; 

My Lily's mine in heaven ! 

" Still mine ! maternal rights serene 

Not given to another ! 
The crystal bars shine faint between 

The souls of child and mother. 

"Meanwhile," the mother cries, "content! 

Our love was well divided. 
Its sweetness following where she went, 

Its anguish stayed where I did. 

" Well done of God, to halve the lot, 
And give her all the sweetness ; 

To us, the empty room and cot, — 
To her, the Heaven's completeness. 

* The my stiongly emphasised, both times, of oouree. 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 517 

" To us, this grave — to her, the rows 

The mystic palm-trees spring in. 
To us, the silence in the house, — 

To her, the choral singing. 
" For her, to gladden in God'^ view, — 

For us, to hope and bear on ! — 
Grow, Lily, in thy garden new, 

Beside the rose of Sharon. 
" Grow fast in heaven, sweet Lily clipped, 

In love more calm than this is, — 
And may the angels dewy-lipped 

Eemind thee of our kisses ! ^ 
" While none shall tell thee of our tears, 

These human tears now falli'ng. 
Till, after a few patient years, 

One home shall take us all in. 
" Child, father, mother, — who left out? 

Not mother, and not father ! — 
And when, our dying couch about, 

The natural mists shall gather, 
" Some smiling angel close shall stand, 

In old Corregio's fashion, 
And bear a Lily in his hand, 

For death's Annunciation." 

Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh has some serious and pervading 
faults, both in manner and in spirit,' — too much evidence of 
effort and ambition, both in the thought and the language, 
exploding occasionally in mere tricks of style, oftener putting 
us off with wit instead of poetry, and generally over-charging 
and over-straining the expression, together with a constantly 
recurring tone of dictation and sarcasm, which is the more 
unpleasant inasmuch as it does not seem natural to the writer, 
and, what is perhaps worst of all, a visibly uneasy conscious- 
ness, or at least apprehension, never long absent, that her task 
is after all beyond her strength; but, with all its faults, it 
may fairly claim to be, so far as is known, the greatest poetical 
work ever produced by a woman. Yet it is still all over and all 
through, in form and in substance, as evidently a product of the 
female mind as any other long poem by a woman that we 
possess. It is, indeed, we should say, pre-eminently feminine 
in character. It would be almost as impossible to take it for the 
work of a man as to take the Iliad for the work of a woman. 

Born in Tuscany, the child of an English father and an Italian 
mother, who died when she was four years old, Aurora thus 
1 The our emphatic. 



518 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

vividly describes what she felt when, left an orphan by her father 
having been also taken away, and sent for by his relations, 
she first looked upon her new country with her native one fresh 
in her memory : — 

• The train swept us on. 
Was this my father's England ? the great isle ? 
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship 
Of verdure, field from field, as man from man ; 
The skies themselves looked low and positive. 
As almost you could touch them with a hand, 
And dared to do it they were so far off 
From God's celestial crystals ; all things blurred, 
And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates 
Absorb the light here ? — not a hill or stone 
With heart to strike a radiant colour up 
Or active outline on the indifferent air. 

Gradually, however, she comes to appreciate something of the 
tamer landscape : — 

Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woods 
Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs 
To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps 
Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear 
In leaping through the palpitating pines, 
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity 
With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed 
My multitudiaous mountains, sitting in 
The magic circle, with the mutual touch 
Electric, panting from their full deep hearts 
Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for 
Communion and commission. Italy 
Is one thing, England one. 

On English ground, 
You understand the letter — ere the fall 
How Adam hved in a garden. All the fields 
Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like ; 
The hills are crumpled plains, the plains parterres. 
The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped, 
And if you seek for any wilderness 
You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed 
And growQ domestic like a barn-door fowl, 
Which does not awe you with its claws and beak 
Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up. 
But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of 
Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause 
Of finer meditation. 

Bather say, 
A sweet familiar nature, stealing in 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 519 

As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand 
Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so 
Of presence and affection, excellent 
For inner uses, from the things without. 

Ere long lier heart opens to it all : — 

Whoever lives true life will love true love. 
I learnt to love that England. Very oft, 
Before the day was born, or otherwise 
Through secret windings of the afternoons, 
1 threw my hunters off and plunged myself 
Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag 
Will take the waters, shivering with the fear 
And passion of the course. And when at last 
Escaped, so many a green slope built on slope 
Betwixt me and the enemy's house behind, 
I dared to rest, or wander, in a rest 
Made sweeter for the step upon the grass. 
And view the ground's most gentle dimplement, 
(As if God's finger touched but did not press 
In making England) such an up and down 
Of verdure, — nothing too much up or down, 
A ripple of land ; such little hills, the sky 
Can stoop to tenderlj'' and the wheatfields climb ; 
Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises, 
Fed full of noises by invisible streams ; 
And open pastures where you scarcely tell 
White daisies from white dew, — at intervals 
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out 
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade, — 
I thought my father's land was worthy too 
Of being my Shakspeare's. 

Equally brilliant and cordial with this picture of English 
nature is this other of the artificial in France (whatever may be 
exactly the meaning of some parts of it). We give the passage 
as rewritten, and very considerably altered from its original 
form, for the fourth edition of the poem : — 

I mused 
Up and down, up and down, the terraced streets, 
The glittering boulevards, the white colonnades 
Of fair fantastic Paris, who wears trees 
Like plumes, as if man made them, spire and tower 
As if they had grown by nature, tossing up 
Her fountains in the sunshine of the squares, 
As if in beauty's game she tossed the dice, 
Or blew the silver down-balls of her dreams 
To sow futurity with seeds of thought 
And count the passage of her festive hours. 



520 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

The city swims in verdure, "beautiful 

As Venice on the waters, the sea-swan. 

What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts 

As plums in ladies' laps who start and laugh : 

What miles of streets that run on after trees, 

Still carrying all the necessary shops. 

Those open caskets with the jewels seen ! 

And trade is art, and art's philosophy, 

In Paris. There's a silk for instance, there, 

As worth an artist's study for the folds 

As that bronze opposite ! nay, the bronze has faults. 

Art's here too artful, — conscious as a maid 

Who leans to mark her shadow on the wall 

Until she lose a 'vantage in her step. 

Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk ; 

The artists also are idealists, 

Too absolute for nature, logical 

To austerity in the application of 

The special theory — not a soul content 

To paint a crooked pollard and an ass, 

As the English will because they find it so 

And like it somehow. — There the old Tuileries 

Is pulling its high cap down on its eyes, 

Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazed 

By the apparition of a new fair face 

In those devouring mirrors. Through the grate 

Within the gardens, what a heap of babes. 

Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees 

From every street and alley of the town, 

By the ghosts perhaps that blow too bleak this way 

A-looking for their heads ! dear pretty babes, 

I wish them luck to have their ball-play out 

Before the next change. Here the air is thronged 

With statues, poised upon their columns fine 

As if to stand a moment were a feat, 

Against that blue ! What squares, what breathing-room 

For a nation that runs fast, — ay, runs against 

The dentist's teeth at the corner in pale rows, 

Which grin at progress in an epigram. 

We add one passage more, wonderful for the imaginative 
subtlety with wliich it is conceived and worked out, — Aurora's 
account of her mother's picture, which hung upon the wall of 
the silent house, " among the mountains above Pelago," to 
which her father had retired after losing her, with his child and 
their faithful old Assunta ; — 

The painter drew it after she was dead. 

And when the face was finished, throat and hands, 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 521 

Her cameriera carried him, in hate 

Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade 

She dressed in at the Pitti ; "he should paint 

No sadder thing than that," she swore, " to wrong 

Her poor signora." Therefore very strange 

The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch 

For hours upon the floor with knees drawn up, 

And gaze across them, half in terror, half 

In adoration, at the picture there, — 

That swan-like supernatural white life 

Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk 

Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power 

To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds. 

For hours I sat and stared. Assunta's awe 

And my poor father's melancholy ejes 

Still pointed that way. That way went my thoughts 

When wandering beyond sight. And as I gTew 

In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously, 

Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed, 

Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful, 

Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque, 

With still that face . . . which did not therefore change, 

But kept the mystic level of all forms. 

Hates, fears, and admirations was by turns 

Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite, 

A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate, 

A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love, 

A still Medusa with mild milky brows 

All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes 

Whose slime falls fast as sweat will ; or anon 

Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords 

Where the Babe sucked ; or Lamia in her first 

Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked 

And shuddering wriggled down to the unclean ; 

Or my own mother, leaving her last smile 

In her last kiss upon the baby-mouth 

My father pushed do^vn on the bed for that, — 

Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss. 

Buried at Florence. 

There are only two other names in the poetical literature of 
the present age that can be held to stand incontestably in the 
first rank ; — Tennyson and Eobert Browning. Diverse in much, 
they have nevertheless also much in common. They are both of 
them profound and subtle thinkers as well as richly endowed 
with the divine faculty of poetry in special ; thinkers, and also 
workers ; and so each has made himself a consummate artist in 
addition to whatever he might otherwise have been of a great 
poet. Tennyson, our present English King of Song, crowned as 



522 ENGLISH LITERATUBE AND LANGUAGE. 

such not more by official nomination tlian by the general voice, 
has won to himself the personal attachment of his countrymen in 
a degree that has been rarely equalled in the history of literature. 
Among ourselves, Scott is the only other great writer who ever 
was held during his lifetime in anything like the same universal 
love and honour. The poetry of Tennyson has charmed all hearts 
by something more than its artistic qualities. It is as full of 
nobleness as of beauty. The laurel when he resigns it to 
another will again be acknowledged by all to be "greener from 
the brows of him that uttered nothing base." Everywhere his 
verse, whether tender or lofty, whether light-hearted or sad, 
breathes the kindest and manliest nature. Isot only the chief of 
his shorter poems, but his 'In Memoriam and his Idylls of the 
King, are familiar to all readers. The following is in his 
simplest and quietest manner, but it is very perfect : — 

In her ear he whispers gaily, 

" If my heart by signs can tell, 
Maiden, I have watched thee daily, 

And I think thou lov'st me well." 
She replies, in accents fainter, 

" There is none I love like thee." 
He is hut a landscape-painter, 

And a village maiden she. 
He to lips that fondly falter 

Presses his without reproof ; 
Leads her to the village altar, 

And they leave her father's roof. 
" I can make no marriage present : 

Little can I give my wife. 
Love will make our cottage pleasant, 

And I love thee more than life." 
They by parks and lodges going, 

See the lordl}^ castles stand : 
Summer woods, about them blowing. 

Made a murmur in the land. 
From deep thought himself he rouses. 

Says to her that loves him well, 
" Let us see these handsome houses 

Where the wealthy nobles dwell." 
So she goes by him attended. 

Hears him lovingly converse. 
Sees whatever fair and splendid 

Lay betwixt his home and hers ; 
Parks with oak and chestnut shady. 

Parks and ordered gardens great. 
Ancient homes of lord and lady. 

Built for pleasure and for state. 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 523 

All he shows her makes him dearer : 

Evermore she seems to gaze 
On that cottage growing nearer, 

Where they twain will spend their days. 
but she will love him truly ! 

He shall have a cheerful home ; 
She will order all things duly, 

When beneath his roof they come. 
Thus her heart rejoices greatly, 

Till a gateway she discerns 
With armorial bearings stately, 

And beneath the gate she turns ; 
Sees a mansion more majestic 

Than all those she saw before : 
Many a gallant gay domestic, 

Bows before him at the door. 
And they speak in gentle murmur. 

When they answer to his call. 
While he treads with footstep firmer, 

Leading on from hall to hall. 
And, while now she wonders blindly, 

Nor the meaning can divine, 
Proudly turns he round and kindly, 

" All of this is mine and thine." 
Here he lives in state and bounty, 

Lord of Burleigh, fair and free, 
Not a lord in all the county 

Is so great a lord as he. 
All at once the colour flushes 

Her sweet face from brow to chin : 
As it were with shame she blushes, 

And her spirit changed within. 
Then her countenance all over 

Pale again as death did prove ; 
But he clasped her like a lover, 

And he cheered her soul with love. 
So she strove against her weakness, 

Though at times her spirits sank : 
Shaped her heart with woman's meekness 

To all duties of her rank : 
And a gentle consort made he. 

And her gentle mind was such 
That she grew a noble lady, 

And the people loved her much. 
But a trouble weighed upon her. 

And perplexed her, night and morn, 
With the burden of an honour 

Unto which she was not born. 
Faint she grew, and ever fainter, 

As she murmured, " Oh, that he 



524 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE, 

Were once more that landscape-iDainter 

Which did win my heart from me !" 
So she drooped and drooped before him, 

Fading slowlj" from his side : 
Three fair children first she bore him, 

Then before her time she died. 
Weeping, weeping, late and early. 

Walking np and pacing down, 
Deeply monrned the Lord of Bnrleigh, 

Bmieigh House, by Stamford Town. 
And he came to look npon her, 

And he looked at her and said, 
" Bring the dress and put it on her, 

That she wore when she was wed." 
Then her people, softly treading, 

Bore to earth her body, drest 
In the dress that she was wed in. 

That her spirit might have rest. 

By way of contrast to this true English ballad, and to ex- 
emplify Tennyson's extent of range, we will give now a few lines 
from the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, which 
make one of the great passages in the poetry of the world : — 

— This is England's greatest son, 
He that gained a hundred fights, 
Nor ever lost an English gun ; 
This is he that far away 
Against the myriads of Assaye 
Clashed with his fiery few and won ; 
And underneath another sun, 
Warring on a later day, 
Bound affrighted Lisbon drew 
The treble work, the vast designs 
Of his laboured rampart-lines, 
Where he greatly stood at bay, 
Whence he issued forth anew, 
And ever great and greater grew. 
Beating from the wasted vines 
Back to France her banded swarms, 
Back to France with countless blows, 
Till o'er the hills her eagles flew 
Past the Pyrenean pines, 
Followed up in valley and glen 
With blare of bugle, clamour of men, 
Eoll of cannon and clash of arms, 
And England pouring on her foes. 
Such a war had such a close. 
Again their ravenino; eaoie rose 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 525 

In anger, wheeled on Europe -shadowing wings, 

And barking for the thrones of kings ; 

Till one that sought but Duty's iron crown 

On that loud sabbath shook the spoiler down ; 

A day of onsets of despair ! 

Dashed on every rocky square 

Their surging charges foamed themselves away ; 

Last, the Prussian trumpet blew ; 

Through the long tormented air 

Heaven flashed a sudden jubilant ray, 

And down we swept and charged and overthrew.^ 

So great a soldier taught us there 

What long-enduring hearts could do, 

In that world's earthquake, AVaterloo ! 

Pope is singular among our modern poets as having written 
nothing in blank verse ; we do not remember that Tennyson has 
published so much as a sentence of prose. Not even, we believe, 
the shortest preface, dedication, or foot-note. In this as in 
other ways he has treated the public with almost ceremonious 
respect. Being by nature and vocation a poet, he declines to 
show himself without his singing robes about him. He will not 
make himself common, as he will do nothing carelessly or in 
haste. Nor has Browning either ever attempted to palm off 
careless work upon his readers. His Paracelsus, published when 
he was only three-and-twenty, marvellous as it was for the depth 
and completeness of the conception, was perhaps still more 
remarkable for the delicacy and perfection of the execution, 
peculiar as the manner was in some respects. And everything 
that he has produced since, even when departing farthest from 
established models, has been elaborated and finished with the 
same masterly skill. But, although he too has now made him- 
self a great name, he has never attained, and is not likely ever to 
attain, the universal popularity of Tennyson, the general admira- 
tion at once of the few and of the many. There is scarcely any- 
thing in his poetry that is specially English. What of it is not 
distinctly of another country is either cosmopolitan or not of the 
earth at all. He has no special sympathies with the people 
whose language he writes, or with anything belonging to them — 
either their literature, their history, their political institutions, 
or any feeling that makes the national heart beat highest. It is 
irksome to most people to read English poetry, however fine 
artistically regarded, with so little in it of an English heart. 
Yet much of Browning's poetry, considered simply as poetry, is 

* The emphasis on ive, as perhaps also on their four lines above. 



526 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

certainly, both, in the soul of passionate vision that animates it 
and in grace and expressiveness of form, as exquisite as anything 
that has been produced in our day. He is often complained of 
as difficult to understand ; and no doubt the train of thought is 
sometimes remote and subtle, and the language wrought to a cor- 
responding degree of compression and fineness of edge, doing its 
work like the lancet or like the lightning. But this is equally 
true of much of Tennyson's poetry. Neither is to be read run- 
ning. Browning, however, is so great a master of words that 
there is nothing he cannot make them do for him, no manner of 
using them in which he is not at home. Here is a portion (we 
must not be so unconscionable as to appropriate the whole) of 
one poem of his which is as simple and easy in style as it is airy 
and brilliant, and is in every way fitted to charm both old and 
young, — " The Pied Piper of Hamelin; A Child's Story," as it is 
entitled, " (written for, and inscribed to, W. M. the younger.) " : — 

Hamelin town 's in Brunswick, 

By famous Hanover city ; 
The river Weser, deep and wide. 

Washes its walls on the southern side ; 
A pleasanter spot you never spied ; 

But when begins my ditty, 
Almost five hundred years ago. 

To see the townsfolk suffer so 
From vermin, was a pity. 

Eats ! 
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats. 

And bit the babies in the cradles. 
And ate the cheeses out of the vats, 

And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles, 
Split open the kegs of salted sprats. 
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, 
And even spoiled the women's chats, 

By drowning their speaking 

With shrieking and squeaking 
In fifty different sharps and flats. 

At last the people in a body 

To the Town Hall came flocking : 
" 'Tis clear," cried they, " our Mayor's a noddy ; 

" And as for our Corporation — shocking 
*' To think we buy gowns lined with ermine 
" For dolts who can't or won't determine 
" What's best to rid us of our vermin ! 
" You hope, because you're old and obese 
*' To find in the furry civic rube ease ? 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 527 

** Rouse up, Sirs ! Give your brains a racking 
" To find the remedy we're lacking, 
" Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing !" 
At this the Mayor and Corporation 
Quaked with a mighty consternation. 

An hour they sat in council ; 

At length the Mayor broke silence : 
" For a guilder I'd my ermine gown sell ; 

" I wish I were a mile hence ! 
" It's easy to bid one rack one's brain — 
" I'm sure my poor head aches again, 
" I've scratched it so, and all in vain. 
" Oh, for a trap, a trap, a trap !" 
Just as he said this, what should hap 
At the chamber door but a gentle tap ? 
" Bless us," cried the Mayor, " what's that ?" 
(With the Corporation as he sat. 
Looking little, though wondrous fat ; 
Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister 
Than a too-long-opened oyster, 
Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous 
For a plate of turtle green and glutinous) 
" Only a scraping of shoes on the mat ? 
" Anything like the sound of a rat 
" Makes my heart go pit-a-pat !" 

" Come in !" the Mayor cried, looking bigger : 

And in did come the strangest figure ! 

His queer long coat from heel to head 

Was half of yellow and half of red ; 

And he himself was tall and thin, 

With sharp blue, eyes, each like a pin, 

And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin, 

No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin. 

But lips where smiles went out and in — 

There was no guessing his kith and kin ! 

And nobody could enough admire 

The tall man and his quaint attire : 

Quoth one : " It's as my great-grandsire, 

" Starting up at the trump of Doom's tone, 

" Had walked this way from his painted tombstone." 

He advanced to the council-table : 

And, " Please your honours," said he, " I'm able, 

" By means of a secret charm, to draw 

" All creatures living beneath the sun, 

"That creep, or swim, or fly, or run, 

" After me so as you never saw ! 

" And I chiefly use my charm 

" On creatures that do people harm,. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

" The mole, and toad, and newt, and viper ; 

" And people call me the Pied Piper." 

(And here they noticed round his neck 

A scarf of red and yellow stripe, 

To match with his coat of the selfsame cheque ; 

And at the scarf's end hung a pipe ; 

And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying 

As if impatient to he playing 

Upon this pipe, as low it dangled 

Over his vesture so old-fangled). 

" Yet," said he, "poor piper as I am, 

*' In Tartary I freed the Cham, 

" Last June, from his huge swarms of gnats ; 

" I eased in Asia the Nizam 

" Of a monstrous hrood of vampire-hats : 

" And, as for what your brain bewilders, 

" If I can rid your town of rats 

" Will you give me a thousand guilders ?" 

"One? fifty thousand!" was the exclamation 

Of the astonished Mayor and Corporation. 

Into the street the Piper stept, 

Smiling first a little smile. 
As if he knew what magic slept 

In his quiet pipe the while ; 
Then, like a musical adept, 
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled. 
And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled 
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled ; 
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered, 
You heard as if an army muttered ; 
And the muttering grew to a grumbling ; 
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling ; 
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. 
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, 
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, 
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, 

Fathers, mothers, uncles, coirsins. 
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers. 

Families by tens and dozens, 
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives — 
Followed the piper for their lives. 
From street to street he piped advancing, 
And step for step they followed dancing, 
Until they came to the river Weser, 
Wherein all plunged and perished — 
Save one, who, stout as Julius Csesar, 
Swam across and lived to carry 
(As he the manuscript he cherished) 
To Eat-land home his commantary, 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 529 

Whicli was, " At the first shrill notes of the pipe, 

" I heard a sonnd as of scraping tripe, 

" And putting apples, wondrous ripe, 

*' Into a cider-press's gripe : 

" And a moving away of pickle-tub boards, 

" And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards, 

" And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks, 

" And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks : 

" And it seemed as if a voice 

" (Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery 

" Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice ! 

" The world is grown to one vast drysaltery ! 

" So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, 

" Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon ! 

" And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon, 

" All ready staved, like a great sun .shone 

" Glorious scarce an inch before me, 

" Just as methought it said, Come, bore me ! 

" — I found the Weser rolling o'er me." 

You should have heard the Hamelin people 

Einging the bells till they rocked the steeple ; 

" Go," cried the Mayor, " and get long poles ! 

" Poke out the nests and block up the holes ! 

" Consult with carpenters and builders, 

" And leave in our town not even a trace 

" Of the rats !" — when suddenly up the face 

Of the Piper perked in the market-place. 

With a " First, if you please, my thousand guilders !" 

But for the manner in whicli this fair demand was received by 
the mlers of the delivered town, and all that thence ensued, the 
reader must be left to resort to the poet's own pages. We give 
as a specimen of another kind the concluding lines of Paracelsus's 
long and eloquent dying declamation : — 

Love's undoing 
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate, 
And what proportion love should hold with power 
In his right constitution ; love preceding 
Power, and with much power always much more love ; 
Love still too straitened in its present means, 
And earnest for new power to set it free. 
I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned : 
And thus, when men received with stupid wonder 
My first revealings, would have worshipped me. 
And I despised and loathed their profiered praise — 
When, with awakened eyes, they took revenge 
For past credulity in casting shame 
On my real knowledge, and I hated them — 

2 M 



530 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 

It was not strange I saw no good in man, 

To overbalance all the wear and waste 

Of faculties, displayed in vain, but born 

To prosper in some better sphere : and why ? 

In my own heart love had not been made wise 

To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, 

To know even hate is but a mask of love's, 

To see a good in evil, and a hope 

In ill-success ; to sympathize, be proud 

Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim 

Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies, 

Their prejudice, and fears, and cares, and doubts ; 

Which all touch upon nobleness, despite 

Their error, all tend upwardly though weak, 

Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 

But dream of him, and guess where he may be, 

And do their best to climb and get to him. 

All this I knew not, and I failed. Let men 

Kegard me, and the poet dead long ago 

Who once loved rashly ; and shape forth a third, 

And better-tempered f^pirit, warned by both : 

As from the over-radiant star too mad 

To drink the light-springs, beamless thence itself— 

And the dark orb which borders the abyss, 

Ingulfed in icy night, — might have its course 

A temperate and equi-distant world. 

Meanwhile, I have done well, though not all well. 

As yet men cannot do without contempt — 

'Tis for their good, and therefore fit awhile 

That they reject the weak, and scorn the false, 

Eather than praise the strong and true, in me. 

But, after, they will know me ! If I stoop 

Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 

It is but for a time ; I press God's lamp 

Close to my breast — its splendour, soon or late, 

Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one day ! 

And thus the finished music of the poem returns to the same 
note from which it had sprung up on its grand parabolic sweep, 
and the self-willed and daring but always noble as well as 
brilliant visionary to the words with which he had broken away 
long ago from his two friends Festus and Michal :■■ — 
I go to prove my soul ! 

I see my way as birds their trackless way — 

I shall arrive ! what time, what circuit first, 

I ask not : but, unless God send his hail 

Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stiflina: snow. 

In some time — his good time — I shall arrive : 

He guides me and the bird. In his good time ! 



LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT DAY. 531 

If there be a fourtli name belonging to this period, the middle 
portion of the present century, which after-times will recognize as 
that of a poet of the first class, it is that of the late Thomas Hood. 
No one of his contemporaries has surpassed him either in perfec- 
tion of workmanship or in originality of conception. Upon what- 
ever he has written he has stamped the impress of himself, and 
as with a diamond signet. Nor, although his most distinctive 
manner is comic, is he at all inferior to himself when he adopts a 
different style, as he has done in several of his best-known 
poems. As in other instances, indeed, — for example, in Horace 
and in Burns — what gives their peculiar character and charm to 
his most pathetic touches is essentially the same thing which 
makes the brilliancy of his comic manner. All that is most 
characteristic of him in expression and thought is to be discerned 
in the curious felicity of the following exquisitely beautiful and 
tender lines : — 

We watched her breathing through the night, 

Her breathing soft and low, 
As in her breast the wave of life 

Kept heaving to and fro. 

So silently we seemed to speak, 

So slowly moved about, 
As we had lent her half our powers 

To eke her living out. 

Our very hopes belied om fears, 

Our fears our hopes belied — 
We thought her dying when she slept. 

And sleeping when she died. 

For when the morn came dim and sad, 

And chill with early showers, 
Her quiet eyelids closed — she had 

Another morn than ours. 



533 



INDEX. 



Accentual verse, 113, 124 
Addison, Joseph, 357 
Akenside, Dr. Mark, 379 
Alchemists, 71 

Aldred, Archbishop, Curse of, 87 
Alfred the Great, 13 
Alliterative verse, 110 
Ancren Riwle, 99 
Andrews, Bishop, 276 
Anglo-Saxon, or Saxon, 20 
Anne, age of, 457, 458 
Anselm, 32, 34, 41 
Arabic learning, 29 
Arabic numerals, 71 
Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 362 
Armstrong, Dr. John, 379 
Ascham, Roger, 188 
Atterbury, Bishop, 363 

B, 

Bacon, Francis, 275 

Bacon, Roger, 73, 96 

Baker, Sir Richard, 310 

Bale's Kynge Johan, 207 

Barbour, John, 157 

Barklay, Alexander, 191 

Barrow, Dr. Isaac, 338 

Baxter, Richard, 337 

Beattie, James, 394 

Beaumont, Francis, 266, 281, 331 

Ben Jonson, 270 

Bible, Translation of the, 273 

Blackmore, Sir Richard, 365 

Blank verse, 210 

Bolingbroke, Lord, 364 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 306 

Browne, William, 296 

Browning, Mrs,, 514 

Browning, Robert, 525 



Brunne, Robert de, 105 

Buckhurst, Lord, vide Sackville, T, 

Bunyan, John, 338 

Burke, Edmund, 408 

Burnet, Bishop, 345 

Burnet, Thomas, 346 

Burns, Robert, 440 

Burton, Robert, 277 

Butler, Samuel, 323 

Byron, Lord, 496 



Campbell, Thomas, 490 
Carew, Thomas, 287 
Cartwright, William, 284 
Celtic Languages and Literature, 7 
Chapman, George, 251 
Charles L, 297 
Chatterton, Thomas, 395 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 121 
Chaucer's prose, 165 
Chillingworth, William, 301 
Chroniclers, 169 
Churchill, Charles, 239 
Gibber, Colley, 370 
Clarendon, Lord, 333 
Classical learning, 41 
Cleveland, John, 289 
Coleridge, S. T., 474 
Collins, William, 376 
Commonwealth Literature, 310 
Compound English, 121 
Congreve, William, 369 
Conquests, the Norman, 24 
Corbet, Bishop, 285 
Cowley, Abraham, 321 
Cowper, William, 427 
Crabbe, George, 427, 488, 492 
Cranmer, Archbishop, 186 
Cudworth, Dr. Ralph, 337 



534 



INDEX. 



Daniel, Samuel, 242, 279 

Darwin, Erasmus, 437 

Davies, Sir John, 253 

Defoe, Daniel, 366 

Denham, Sir John, 288 

Donne, Dr. John, 254, 27 

Dorset, Earl of, vide Sackville, T. 

Douglas, Gawin, 195 

Drama, end of the old, 280 

Drama, the regular, 200 

Dramatists of Eighteenth Century, 369, 396 

Dramatists of Seventeenth Century, 331 

Drayton, Michael, 246 

Drummond, Sir William, 253 

Dryden, John, 328 

Dunhar, William, 196 

Dyer, John, 371 

E. 

Edwards, Richard, 211 

Eighteenth Century, latter part of, 427 

Elizabethan Literature, 198 

Elizabethan Poetry, 237 

Elizabethan Prose Writers, 219, 272 

Elyot, Sir Thomas, 186 

English as a literary tongue, 82 

English after the Conquest, 56 

English Language, 16, 28 

English, original (Saxon or Anglo-Saxon), 

20 
English, Revolutions of, 84. 
Essayists, Periodical, 398 
Euphuism, 219 
Europe, Languages of Modern, 1 



Fairfax, Edward, 252 

Falconer, William, 393 

Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 253 

Farquhar, George, 369 

Female Writers, 397 

Ferres and Porrex, 208 

Fielding, Hemy, 884 

Fletcher, Giles, 282 

Fletcher, John, 266, 281, 331 

Fletcher, Phineas, 282 

Ford, John, 272 

Fortescue, Sir John, 171 

French Language in England, 48, 79 

French School of Poetry, 286 

FuUer, Thos., 303 



G. 

Gammer Gurton's Needle, 205 
Garth, Sir Samael, 365 
Gay, John, 362 
Georges, last Age of the, 459 
Gibbon, Edward, 425 
Gloucester, Robert of, 104 
Glover, Richard, 379 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 388 
Gorboduc, Tragedy of, 208 
Gower, John, 155 
Gray, Thomas, 377 
Greene, Robert, 213, 221 

H. 

Hales, John, 301 
Hall, Bishop, 275 
HaU, Joseph, 249 
Harington, Sir John, 252 
Hai-rington, Sir James, 308 
Hawes, Stephen, 191 
Henry the Minstrel, 179 
Henryson, Robert, 179 
Herbert, George, 283 
Herrick, Robert, 284 
Heywood, John, 194, 202 
Historical Writers, 278 
Hobbes Thomas, 334 
Hood, Thomas, 531 
Hooker, Richai-d, 275 
Hume, David, 422 
Hunt, Leigh, 505 



James L of Scotland, 177 
Johnson, Samuel, 404 
Junius, 402 

K. 

Keats, John, 501 
Knolles, Richai-d, 279 
Kyd, Thomas, 216 

L. 

Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oyl, 53 

Latimer, Bishop, 186 

Latin after the Conquest, 46 

Latin Chroniclers, 47 

Latin Literature of Britain, early, 8 

Layamon, 89 

Learned tongues, the, 75 

Leighton, Archbishop, 337 

Locke, John, 348 

Lodcre, Thomas, 216 



INDEX. 



535 



Lovelace, Richard, 287 
Lydgate, John, 175 
Lyly, John, 215, 219, 221 
Lyndsay, Sii' David, 196 

M. 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 173 

Mandevil, Sir John, 164 

Mandeville, Bernard de, 359 

Mannyng, Robert, 105 

Marlowe, Christopher, 214 

]\Iarvel, Andrew, 325 

Mason, William, 394 

Massinger, Philip, 271 

Mathematicivl Studies, 69 

Metaphysical Writers, 421 

Milton, John, Poetry of, 312 

Milton, John, Prose of, 299 

Minor Poets of Eighteenth Century, 370 

Minot, Lawrence, 106 

Miracle Plays, 201 

Mirror for Magistrates, 198 

Misogonus, 206 

Mixed English, 121 

Moore, Thomas, 489, 495 

Moral Plays, 201 

More, Dr. Henry, 337 

More, Sir Thomas, 184 

N. 

Nash, Thomas, 223 

Ne\a]e, Henry, 336 

Newspapers, 309 

Nineteenth Century, 457 

Nineteenth Century, early part of, 510 

0. 

Occleve, Thomas, 174 
Oriental Learning, 77 
Ormulum, the, 95 
Ossian's, Macpherson, 395 

P. 

Pamell, Dr. Thomas, 364 

Pecock, Bishop, 169 

Peele, George, 212 

Percy's Reliques, 395 

Piers Ploughman's, 110 

Political Economy, 426 

Pope, Alexander, 353 

Present day, Literature of, 513 

Printing in England, 167 

Prior, Matthevv, 363 

Prose, English, 164, 183 



Quarles, Francis, 283 

R. 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 278 
Ralph Roister Doister, 203 
Randolph, Thomas, 285 
Religious Poets, 283 
Revolution, Effects of, 341 
Revolution, Survivors of, 342 
Richardson, Samuel, 382 
Ridley, Bishop, 186 
Robertson, William, 424 
Roman de la Rose, 137 
Romance, Metrical, 102 
Roy, William, 194 

S. 

Sackville, Thomas, 199, 208 
Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon, 20 
Scholarship, English, Earliest, 12 
Scholastic Philosophy, 39, 67 
Scott, Sir Walter, 482 
Scottish Poetry, 380 
Scottish Poets, 176, 195 
Scottish Prose Writers, 190 
Second English, 85 
Sedley, Sir Charles, 327 
I Semi-Saxon, 85 
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 359 
Shakespeare's Dramatic Contemporaries, 

265 
Shakespeare, William, 257, 258 
Shelley, P. B., 497 
Shenstone, William, 377 
Shirley, James, 280 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 220 
Skelton, John, 192 
Smollett, Tobias, 385 
South, Dr. Robert, 347 
Southey, Robert, 481 
Spenser, Edmund, 224 
Steele, Sir Richard, 357 
Sterne, Laurence, 387 
Suckling, Sir John, 288 
Surrey, Earl of, 196 
Swift, Jonathan, 349 
Sylvester, Joshua, 249 

T. 

Taylor, Jeremy, 302 
Tennyson, Alfred, 521 



536 

Theological Elizabethan Writers, 274 
Third English, 121 
Thomson, James, 378 
Tillotson, Archbishop, 346 



U. 

Udall, Nicholas, 203 
Universities and Schools. 34, 73 



V. 
Vanbrugh, Sir John. 369 



INDEX. 



W. 



Waller, Edmund, 323 

Warner, William, 238 

Warton, Thomas and Joseph, 394 

Wiclif, John de, 165 

Wilkes, John, 401 

Wilkie, William, 379 

Wilson, Thomas, 189 

Wither, George, 290 

Wordsworth, William, 459 

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 197 

Wynton, Andrew of, 176 



Young, Dr. Edward, 377 



THE END. 



lOWOON": PRTNTSD BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CKOSS, 



€ 




■0' . 



•■-*:o^;-"':%;'^°"o\^- 




Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatnnent Date: Jan. 2009 

Preservationlechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OF COIMfiBPCc 

^024 323 342 2 



i i pill i^iii^l 






Hi 















/>'i; 









;;i!i;jh.;; 



•-i^'Uii 



':>!!;' 



/'"^' 



'iii'gi^i 



